Stretching My Wings

One of the shortcomings of a number of online diabetes communities has been the ability to point other readers to original research in the various fields related to diabetes, and at the same time not totally befuddle folk who don’t have the time or the background to delve into the technical aspects of the research, or put it into the overall context of diabetes research.

For most of us, the standard news wires keep us informed of directly-related research, but the newswires don’t always put that research into context. Sometimes they don’t even tell us whether the research is preliminary or advanced, or whether the study was large enough to give results that can be applied to the larger population. As a technophile, I’ll read something from HealthDay or Reuters that looks interesting, and I’ll want to go back to the original source to see what the newswire omitted and analyze the article for myself.

While I’m not a doctor, nurse, or diabetes educator, I did spend the majority of my working life in a technical publishing environment, and I have no qualms about digging into technical journals to find, and make sense of, the latest research. So, I’m trying something new. I’m going mainstream – using Blogger for right now – to start a blog meant both to “translate” technical journals into plain language and to point readers to the original research to check things out for themselves. I don’t know how well this is going to work in the long run – I still need to find my voice, and refine my structure – but if I don’t try, I won’t succeed.

It’s probably going to take me some time to get up enough of an initial set of posts to be useful, but you can check out this work in progress at Diabetes Detechnified Please let me know if you think I’m still too technical, or if I’ve dumbed things down too much. These first couple of posts are pretty close to the limit of how technical I expect the blog to get, both in terms of the initial source material and my ability to understand what’s being written. Again, this is the initial stage of a work in progress.

This new endeavor won’t replace my more personal posts here on TuDiabetes – it’s just a more public venue for a more tailored goal.

Thank you very much for this initiative,it will be more of use to professinals than the public. I agree with you that not evey study is with reliable result,but the contradiction help the public to observe and not to take every thing as proved final result. I do admire your dedication and scientific approach to every thing.

Great Idea!
Due to your background I’m sure you will succedd in finding appropriate ways for organizing, tagging, and etc the work, as well as finding the tone and level where it will be usefull for lots! Good luck with the process!
Brosing health related blogs, I found that some of them have a sort of accreditation that I think you will find useful. It is the “Blogging Code for Healthcare Professionals and Patients” at: http://medbloggercode.com/