Curbside.MD utilizes Praxeon's patent-pending semantic fingerprinting technology. This technology uses a sophisticated model of medical terminology to extract the meaning and relationships of words within any unstructured text source.

What does that mean?

That means you can enter naturally phrased clinical questions to search evidence based material. Think of the question like you were asking a colleague - that's the level of depth and breadth Curbside.MD can handle. The more details you enter, the more accurate the search results. Enter patient information, specific disease concepts, drug dosages - the more information the better!

Where can I find my answer?

The Results Summary Page is your first glimpse into the search results. In many cases you should be able to find your answer right on this first page. We've made finding your answer easy by dividing the results into a couple of easy to navigate categories:

Best Hits

This presents the most relevant results across ALL of our evidence based content sources. If you have a specific clinical situation in mind, you can refine the best hits using one of the tabs on the left for either differential diagnosis, work-up, treatment, epidemiology, case reports.

Visual Diagnosis

These are peer-reviewed images from premier sources that are pertinent to your search. You can click on the image, read the caption and even move it to a different location on the screen.

Quick Consult

These are high-level, overview articles when you're not entirely familiar with the topic you are searching. The first part of Quick Consult is "Guidelines, recommendations and drug overview." This contains material from the National Guidelines Clearinghouse, the FDA and professional societies. The second part of Quick Consult is "Review articles" and contains review articles from top tier journals found in PubMed

The Best Evidence

These are in-depth, focused articles when you're more familiar with the area you are searching. The Best Evidence is divided into systematic reviews, including articles from the Cochrane Collaboration, ACP Journal Club and meta-analyses and clinical trial outcomes, including results from randomized controlled and other clinical trials.

Clinical Trials

These are trials from ClinicalTrials.gov with high relevancy to your query.

But I still can't find my answer

You have a couple of options. Articles on the front page are usually drawn from core journals and recent publications. Non-core journals and older articles are in Curbside.MD, but you may need to use the View Additional Results feature to find them. Take an in-depth look in the literature and you'll hopefully find what you're looking for.

Another option is to rephrase your question and be more exacting in the level of detail and material you are looking for. People aren't used to searching for exactly what they're thinking. It takes time to get used to - but the results are worth it.

And if after all this - you still can't find your answer - please tell us! We want to know. We want to make things better. We can't do that without your feedback. Use the 'Send us Feedback' link at the top of each page.

But I really like to search with keywords.

We know that old habits are hard to break. You can enter a drug or disease keyword and we've organized the results to help find your answer fast! If you enter a drug keyword, the Best Hits section is replaced with a Drug Information section. This contains only FDA material broken into concise categories like drug description, indications, contraindications, precautions, warnings, dosage and adverse effects.

If you enter a disease keyword, Best Hits is replaced with a Disease Information section. This contains a definition of the disease along with tabs on categories like guidelines and work-up. And we've also added some suggestions on more complete, non-keyword, Curbside-y, searches you can launch from the simple keyword starting point.

I think some of the content is misplaced or should be removed. What do I do?

Tell us what errors you are finding or what material should not be there. And be sure to tell us about the problem in the context of your search. We want to hear from you. Use the 'Send us Feedback' link at the top of each page.

I know a great evidence-based site for medicine that isn't on Curbside. How can it get loaded on?

Just tell us. We'll review it for accuracy and merit - and if it's up to snuff - we'll include it!

Anything else I need to know?

For any listed reference - click the title of the article and the entire abstract will just pop up! And if you click on "Full text" a new window will open with the original source material.