My two favorite PICO's



1.  The Puma PICO





2.  PICO #2:  "For a 40-year old, Caucasian female with bipolar disorder, is electroconvulsive therapy more effective than lithium for reducing hallucinations?"

Patient =          40-yr old, Caucasian female

Problem =        Bipolar disorder

Intervention =  Electroconvulsive therapy

Comparison =  Lithium

Why?  Is it a good PICO.  Cuz it's all MeSH...no plebeian keywords allowed here.  4 solid parts of controlled vocabulary goodness that is saving Princess Leia...

Carrie Fisher spiraled into the worst depression of her life after a close friend died in 2005. "I was as close to being suicidal as you can be without being suicidal," said the 55-year-old actress, novelist, and Star Wars legend. "I was devastated." When anti-depressants and psychotherapy failed to help, she turned to ECT. "Over time, this f---ing thing punched the dark lights out of my depression," she said. "It was like a mute button muffling the noise of my shrieking feelings." Now she's come to depend on shock treatments every six weeks to keep her demons at bay, though she says the cure can be "a bitch on memory." ECT's most common side effect, temporary memory loss, does have an upside, she said. She forgets movies she's just seen, but now "I can be entertained by them all over again."  --Source "The Week"

"I'm so over MeSH*" or "I know you'd like to search PubMed like Google..."

"Life is not easy for any of us, but what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted in something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained."  --Marie Curie

Yea MeSH can be hard, so is going to college, having children, and a slew of other worthwhile activities.



"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need." --Jagger/Richards 

Many good and useful things are not immediately easy, so I categorically dismiss being over MeSH.  Why?

Hate to sound like an old school librarian, but not really...Bottom line is this..
It's preposterous that someone in bioinformatics would claim to be "so over MeSH."  For advanced users, researchers, and librarians, MeSH is an absolute must.

By the way I love PICO: 

This week's best PICO question:

For a 23 year-old Asian American male, is minoxidil or propecia a more effective treatment for androgenic allopecia to reduce hair loss? 

Tell me why this is such a good PICO question and you'll get extra credit. 

Not really but in my heart you'll get extra credit.

*Word on the street.