How to Keyword Research for Wellness

 I have Dr. Theresa Lyons with me again to talk about how to do keyword research. She was in episode 196 . She was talking about autism and how you can grow out of it. And the reason why I had her come back on is I want her to teach us how to research.

Welcome to Wellness. In every season, we talk all things wellness, to help you align yourself, align with your goals, find balance in your life, and just recalibrate yourself if you are listening for the first time. Welcome, welcome. I'm so glad you're here, and let's get started in the rest of the podcast.

And I want you, Dr. Lyons, to share with us really quick a snapshot of why this matters, using that reporter story again, because it is so common.

And we live in an age of AI where we're just gonna use that without double checking our sources. So tell us. What happened and why it mattered to you.

i'll give the short version of the story. So I have a PhD in computational chemistry from Yale University.

I'm a chemist through and through. I also have two masters in chemistry, one in organic synthesis where for my thesis, I created a new chemical reaction. And the other master's is general chemistry. My bachelor's was also in chemistry too, so I know chemistry. I worked in the pharmaceutical industry.

And when my daughter was diagnosed with autism, I asked the doctors, okay, what do we do? And. There was like no options whatsoever. They're like, it pretty much gets worse, not better. There's medications, but that's really just to treat irritability and you can do some behavioral stuff, but that there's long wait lists and mixed results.

So I went to PubMed and did the researching, I want quality information. I'm a scientist. I know where to get it. That's PubMed, the actual research publications. So I went there and read one study that showed about 10%, and this was about 13 years ago, that 10% of kids with autism lost their diagnosis.

And they were calling that an optimal outcome. So this is contrary to anything any doctor in person had told me. So they told me it gets worse, not better. 10% is worth understanding. Wait, 10%, what is that 10% Doing like, I need to understand that. So that was the research, the quality information that I had.

Throughout this, I'm researching everywhere and I read two articles on Yahoo talking about how autism is lifelong and there's nothing you can do, and so as a parent at the beginning of this journey, I'm like, oh. This journalist is saying that it's lifelong.

I have one publication that says it's 10% can lose the diagnosis. What? What do? Ah, I was so torn. And so I researched the journalist, found him, tracked him down, emailed him, and he explained to me that he researched both those articles that were published on Yahoo, this is mainstream, and this is back in the day when Yahoo was like the place to go,

and so he is like, I put in like two hours of research for those articles and just turned them out. And I thought, oh my goodness, two completely different things, right?

So at that moment, I remember shutting down my laptop and going for a walk and being like, whoa. I almost trusted mainstream media more than my academic background of being a chemist and how I built my career and I really told myself, you have to be careful with where you get information.

you can't let someone's it was really an opinion. It was just regurgitation of, what had been out there in mainstream. So it's really important to get quality information. And I know how hard it is, I was so torn. I'm like, this is Yahoo.

This is two articles and they're just published. Why is he not mentioning anything about optimal outcomes? And it's because he didn't research it. He didn't care. He just had to put two articles out. So it's really important for parents of kids with autism or anyone researching anything health related, you really have to have this critical lens of what is this information?

Where did it come from? What's the quality of it? And really dive into it now. Yes, I have an background in being able to do that. I did that in academia and in the pharmaceutical industry. so today we can go through it and walk through how do we think about things so that we make decisions based on quality information and not just regurgitation of information.

Yeah, I am very excited for this.

Like you, my daughter's life would've been completely different if I had listened to mainstream information. my life would be different. And not for the better,

her life, her future, just everything would not be what it is today if I followed misinformation. that's really the truth of it.

And that's the same for anybody's diagnosis.

that's

very big deal, especially because, let's look at nutrition for a second. Growing up I go to my grandmother's house and everything tastes like cardboard with sugar on top.

Because it, the no carb diet was the way to go. And then it was no sugar and then it was protein rich. Mm-hmm. And if we follow whatever's trending, it negatively impacts our health. Yeah. And it can be very expensive too. Whatever the latest, is, or

Yeah.

Thinking of negatively impacting health is losing that hope.

not even having that hope. If I listened to my doctors and the specialists, They did not talk about this data. whether they knew it or not, maybe they didn't want to get my hopes up I was not given the accurate information in order for me to make good decisions.

I was regurgitated information was not cutting edge, it was not truthful. And could have negatively impacted us. there were so many points where I had to have that confidence in myself, which was extremely hard, Like I was shook for a few days after talking to this journalist and being like, whoa, I almost made huge decisions based on some guy who did research for a few hours.

it can be tiring and overwhelming. you have the diagnosis, the stress of all that, and then you have to figure out how do I make sense of this

t

wo questions come up.

The first is rhetorical, how many times have we spent two hours of research and we think that's good enough when we're not focusing on what's quality. And the non rhetorical question is, are we double checking our bias? And how do we do that? Because you're hearing what everybody else is saying, right?

So how do you prevent that echo chamber bias? Because if you're researching that way, you're gonna find research that proves you, right?

I've been trained to not have the bias I do have a bias, but I'm aware of it. I have been trained to catch that and be careful of that.

And it is something I definitely think about probably more than most people. when you're starting to do research. You don't wanna find only things that agree with your viewpoint because you haven't gone far enough that might just be surface.

And that's if I was, back in the day, if I had only. Searched on Yahoo, on Google. I never would've found this information. And it was in part like, yes, I know to go to PubMed because that is my training, right? But I also know when I read that article, I was like, okay, Now I have something that is different than what I've been told.

And when I was doing that research, it was more I need to know what are my options? So I went in very neutral and then found this information, and then found mainstream information that was just, reconfirming more and more of the narrative. And that's where it got sticky, where it's like, okay which way am I going now to talk about bias a little bit?

So I understand that, right?

So I read that research article and, talked to journalists. Then I reached out to the. author of that scientific article, had a phone call with her and wanted to know, okay, what did you see? What is possible? I really wanted to make that real.

And then because I'm a researcher I started talking to different parents who had the same experience of their child no longer had autism. So I ended up doing about 40 interviews of those parents to really understand what did they do, what were the symptoms 'cause autism was entirely new to me autism is so.

Different. I didn't fully understand that. I'm glad I was naive in that sense because I might not have started. But having that additional data of 40 parents and speaking to them and asking them questions gave me more confidence in the data. And so that's also how I can counter my bias, right?

Because I was more in that neutral zone because I am a researcher And so that's why it was like, let me see what the data tells me. And then I had that understanding of, okay, what I'm doing is cutting edge.

This is not the standard approach that everyone is taking. So I have to be comfortable being in that area of risk, right? Where it's like, okay, 10%, some parents would be like 10%. That's impossible. That's too small. But that's also not my mindset. I'm thinking 10%. Oh, okay. that's something there.

So this is all the things you have to think about when you come across information and you decide, okay, I'm going to follow that. That is the direction I'm going into. You really have to be comfortable. 'cause you'll get a lot of pushback because you're doing something different.

So you have to be comfortable with that. And only now on the other side where I'm like, oh yeah, okay. I really had to be comfortable with everyone telling me that's, what are you doing? And I'm like, I have the science here. I spoke to 40 parents, right?

So my comfort was in the data, but it was being challenged by different people's comments Until then, doctors started being like, Hey, what are you doing? And one of my daughter's specialist encouraged me to start navigating autism. She's like, you really need to educate others.

I was not planning that. But, I am passionate about science quality information and how do you think about it. So that's how we are where we are.

So we understand bias. That's our own thinking. that's coming up with our own hypothesis and we're busy trying to prove it.

So ego's in the way you talked about PubMed, and if I remember correctly, that is one where it's free, where there are other journals where you have to pay for them. Is that correct?

PubMed has most of the scientific journals. Some are free, some you have to pay per article.

talk to the author and get around that.

There's definitely different ways. I had academic credentials. And so for me, I could read any article full length, which was extremely helpful. But you can always read, the abstract.

Conclusion a lot of times it depends on the journal, but you get at least a snippet of what the conclusion is.

Which can be good. But when you wanna dive into it and you can't and you're locked out of it, I learned about Google Scholar, which is

Really great.

And if you're on different government websites, sometimes they have the unlocked article, I've learned that in the research class that I took and several other classes that the amount of people who are in a study can matter as well if it is cutting edge and explain to us what cutting edge is.

My husband uses this term at work, so I know what it is, but explain what that is and why. Sometimes it'll be a smaller sample size. In a study.

the way research goes in health is you have three phases of clinical trials. a lot of times it's also done preclinical in, cells. like in test tubes,

It might be in different animal models You're basically examining the mechanism of action when you're in animal models and cells. trying to establish this is why something is happening in our body when we do something.

when you're looking at changes therapeutic wise. you have preclinical, which is cells or animals. Then you have phase one, which is to say that what we're doing is safe, you have a small sample size, maybe 10 patients and you show that you're not killing anyone, you're not causing any really bad harmful effects.

Typically, this is done on healthy patients. It depends on the therapeutic area. Sometimes the patient enrollment is of that particular therapeutic area

Safety. That's really what is important. And then phase two is if things are safe, then you go to larger numbers and you start looking about, okay, is this, what kind of effect does it have on different goals? So it might be quality of life. It might be measured a certain way. you might be measuring a specific like blood marker.

So some type of biomarker that you're taking a blood test or urine test or some type of thing you can quantify It also can be like oncology. They're looking at it. Life, right? So how long did the patient live longer? So there's many different measurements, but in phase two, you're getting into maybe a hundred-ish type patients.

And then phase three is when you get more into your hoping for like a thousand patients or more. Now, keep in mind it depends on your therapeutic area and the motivation for having these studies. And this is where in autism there's a challenge. So I was a medical strategist for the pharmaceutical industry.

That is how I understand all the different phases and things like that. For the most part, pharmaceutical companies or supplement companies are paying for these clinical trials, which means they show that it works and then now they can charge for whatever it is that they developed or showed that worked.

So you have to

It takes forever.

It takes forever, right? So you might have a clinical trial where you're collecting data for three months for that patient. It might take three months to recruit that patient. You gotta find them and do the pretest and sign all the paperwork. But then, three months before that, for six months, you have to do institutional review boards and make sure that it's ethical what you're doing, right?

So it takes time keep in mind. But the motivation is we are doing this so that we can have a product that shows. X, Y, Z. So in autism, it is very difficult to find, phase three clinical trials where you have thousands of patients with autism testing something because there's no pharmaceutical company out there that has something that actually targets the root cause of autism.

So this is the other thing to keep in mind, right? So a lot of people say, oh, I want evidence. I wanna see 10,000 patients and had been enrolled. Okay? If you're doing that in autism and you don't have a company that's sponsoring it, what are you doing? Are you getting a university to do this?

Phase three? Clinical trials are millions, tens of millions of dollars. So when you're looking at the data, you also wanna analyze and say, is it feasible? To have had 10,000 patients as a data point, right? In a phase three clinical trial, where am I going to be comfortable and say, all right, this seems safe, this seems aligned with what I need, depending on what you're researching for.

And then you make a decision that way. So this is all stuff that you wanna be thinking about when you're trying to say, am I cutting edge? You're cutting edge if you're in any of that preclinical phase one, phase two, phase three. And even after there's an FDA approval for something, a lot of times doctors are like, eh, let's let it ride for a couple of years before we say that we're confident in doing this.

Right? So you have to be mindful of all of that.

And your doctor might be super conservative and be like, I don't typically, make recommendations or follow anything until five years post FDA. Totally fine. That might align and might work for some parents or patients, but for others,

Like they don't wanna risk their license. So if something goes wrong and you sue 'em, 'cause we're a sue happy society

it depends, right? This is where you want that partnership with the doctor. You shouldn't go into a doctor and just be like, okay, you don't like to do anything for five years post FDA approval.

Okay, so I'll just wait. especially when you're talking about a child's health, right? And you're analyzing the risks and the benefits, right? So if a child is five years old, they're in kindergarten. If you wait five years, they're 10. We're talking middle school.

things change, right, exactly. So there's no right or wrong answer but you wanna think about it. How conservative do I wanna be? It depends on the risk, right? So

if there's not much downside, then you might wanna have that conversation with that conservative doctor and say, alright, have you worked with other patients who have done this?

Why are you not comfortable with this? And you might even come to the conclusion of, this is not the right doctor for me because I... am not conservative like that when it comes to making this decision. Right. You might be conservative in other areas, but when you're talking about a specific aspect of health, you might say, no, this data is something I'm comfortable with and I wanna work with a doctor who will work with me.

Right. And that doctor is usually, medicine is a practice. Right. And this is the other thing that most people don't realize. Doctors try different things because it is a practice. And they try and they see, and we don't like to think about it like that because we just think, oh, the doctor has the answer.

But there's very few answers. this is where you need to think critically and you need to have that partnership with the doctor where you can have that back and forth dialogue of discussing different things and weighing that risk. And then doing something either with the doctor or finding a different doctor.

And the reverse could be true too. You might be working with a doctor who is, let's say, publishing, we call them key opinion leaders. They might be the doctor who had done the clinical trials, right? So they're gonna have a totally different knowledge base to draw from because they're doing the research.

So if you're someone who's like, yes, that makes sense for my child, I wanna work with the doctor who did the clinical trial. 'Cause think about the knowledge they have. So that's the doctor I wanna work with because I wanna be aggressive in this particular area. You don't have to be aggressive in everything because maybe this one area is what makes sense for your child.

So this, it's not all doctors should be conservative or all doctors should be cutting edge. You have to analyze what it is that I want, what makes sense for my child. And this takes a lot of work, right? This is like, oh, I don't need this on top of you. Everything that's going on in life.

But unfortunately this is the kind of thinking you have to do when there is a diagnosis and when you're building your healthcare team. So it's important to have all of this as strategies.

I know you already prepared the articles we're gonna go over, but I'm gonna put you on the spot for just a second.

can you show us where you would go to start the research? So for me,

Sure!

I would probably start with Google Scholar. If I still was in school, I would use the research library. I could get to more stuff there

Okay. Let me share my screen.

Start looking through this, what advice would you have for somebody who... Is not used to reading research articles because that is a different language.

Yes.

Maybe somebody who's more used to reading at... the average population level is fourth grade level. So if you're reading at a lower level and these articles are written at a PhD level, what kind of advice would you have along the way?

So yes, PubMed

so this is where I start.

Love using NIH, but yeah.

Gotcha.

So good.

PubMed is usually where I start.

If I get any idea, any thought that's where I'm goingAI was not available when I was doing this initial research for my daughter.

And you have to be really careful with ai. you can't just blindly trust it. so even now with ai, that is not the first place that I go. I go into pub

already have an idea of your answer when you go to ai The more I play with it because it will lead you this direction and you'll have to be able to say no, it's more here and then it backtracks.

So that's why I, like,

it depends

if I'm doing research. Don't use ai.

I find AI has a bias, I find my AI has more bias than I do. So the prompts I give, it would be like, let's say it's, the autism and I'll walk you through how I would do it for AI and how I would do it for PubMed, I would type in autism and do custom filters. So I would be like, all right, I want the last five years, Because this is my initial sweep, Like if I'm like, okay, let me try and understand what autism is. So I would do, I would

off if anything was over six years old.

So five years makes sense

there are times where I will do a historical analysis. sometimes, let's say there was a phase two study, right? And I know that takes maybe three years. I'll go back on that search term for all of the years so that I can see how that progressed.

I can look at, what was done in animals, what was done in, a test tube or in vitro, there are times where I do wanna see the historical data because it gives me the full picture of what's been found. there are times that I definitely will do all history.

Okay, so text availability. I still keep this as I like. (I like all of it). If you only wanna see free full text, you can select this and you'll only get articles where you can click and it's free and you get the PDF.

An abstract is like the cliff notes of

an abstract here.

for me is I could find key words and if they're basing this research off something else, then maybe I can find that.

And that's a free version that I can read.

It could be,

In doing research, which is not cutting edge, I love, the meta-analysis, which means they put together everybody else's research.

So abstract is the summary, right? this is gonna give you what it was looking for. It gives youstudy size, right? it's given you a decent amount of information. It'll give you usually the conclusions in the last sentence or two. So sometimes, you look at the title and then actually, we might have jumped the gun just a little bit, okay, let me just go back to give the initial sweep so that everyone understands.

So we're talking about whether or not you wanna use free full text. I don't recommend selecting this because then you're starting to get a bias, right? just because I can't read the full article. doesn't mean I should discount it, right? Because now we're saying I'm only going to be seen what is free how do you get articles that are free right there?

There's controversy into that, right? if you select only free full text, you're starting to introduce bias. So I would not do that. I would accept that I might only be able to read an abstract and be okay with that, at least on this initial sweep. Now you're getting to article type, that's why I wanted to swing back 'cause you started talking about meta-analysis.

so people can see, all right, I can select the meta-analysis if I want. to answer your question about if I did not have a PhD and I wanted to read research. But I didn't have a joy of reading all this dense stuff, right?

I happen to enjoy that.

I would select review, right? Which means that I'm going to get a nice summary of stuff or I would do a systematic review. They're pretty similar. So this is really reviewing everything. It's probably gonna talk about preclinical. it's really gonna give me that historical explanation.

So when you click on those as options, that's what you're gonna get. And so like, here's a free article, but also here's an article that is not free. When they're free it says it here. And when you don't see anything there, it's not free, right? But you can still see the abstract of it. So if you wanna start to get a quick read.

This is how you would do it.

Reviews, now you're talking about meta-analysis. meta-analysis is going to explore only data related to clinical trials and put all that information together and come up with one kind of universal conclusion.

If I were to do a meta-analysis, I would probably change the publication date to the. Last year or two, I don't want a meta-analysis of data from five years ago, Give me a meta-analysis of the last year, Because this is more cutting edge. Meta-analysis is really looking at clinical trials.

So it's a little bit different than a review,I can let it be older because I'm trying to just get that general idea of what is the research telling me what has been done. So for a meta-analysis, I usually have it much more recent so that I capture those recent clinical trials.

So that's like a slight difference.

If I went with another career path, I would have so much fun doing meta-analysis,

I love meta-analysis

trials. I would do all the.

Like you learn so much in here.

a little side note, when I was doing all this research for my daughter life was really stressful and really overwhelming.

So the way I would make life fun is I would finally get my daughter down for sleep and then I would pop popcorn and I would sit in front of PubMed and be like, I'm having fun. This is my socialness for the day, right? everybody loves PubMed and popcorn, so not Netflix, but like, this is what I did in the beginning to really understand all the different information and I've found.

Joy in it. 'cause this is what I had done, for years. Okay. So that is PubMed and that is what I would do in the beginning to get that initial. Okay. Let me really understand what's going on. Any questions on that?

I found interesting in one of the classes was looking at the names of the authors.

Sometimes you'll find the same names. They'll get a good idea of like, okay, these people work in this field. They could be good contact, but I was also taught to click on them. 'cause it gives like that brief bio and you can find out are they somebody who has done work in this field? They're not a chiropractor that's suddenly talking about autism, I also want a researcher that's talking about autism, if that makes sense.

now you're getting into analysis

general too. Go ahead.

So what you're getting into is analysis of each individual article now.

So if we want, we can go there. it's certainly like the next thing to look at would be, all right, what is the publication and what is the date? So like, how relevant is it? Again, that's why you wanna use that filter. And so then you look, the next thing is you look at the affiliations.

This is important because you do value a publication from Harvard or Yale. 'cause I'm a Yale. So yeah, I have no bias there. So there are certain institutions. That are deeply knowledgeable in certain aspects, right? So Harvard and Yale, they're not tops in everything, right?

Many things, yes, So there is that analysis of who are the authors, And where are they from? And sometimes that is part of a bias, 'cause a lot of times scientists from the US are generally valued more than other countries. Historically that's the way it's been.

but historically, you look for information in the us. So you're looking at, all right these are universities, right? And so we have a university, university of Alabama. A lot of times I like to look is this one research group, right?

So is this a publication that basically is coming from one perspective where they have a head researcher and, grad students or postdocs or stuff like that? Or is this more kind of a collaborative project between a few universities? Because then in many ways the idea has been vetted from different angles in different perspectives.

it's not saying one is better but how do you trust this as information? you want to look at, is this one person's opinion or is this two sites or three sites? that makes a difference.

we happen to pick one that doesn't have no abstract, right? we can skip down in the conflict of interest. every publication has it. a lot of times professors don't have conflict of interest. However, some do, because some professors start different companies, right?

professors who have started different pharmaceutical companies, different diagnostic companies, right? So you do wanna look at, alright, are they publishing this and benefiting from it? That doesn't automatically discount the publication, you can't be biased in the sense of, oh, they're gonna make money off it, right?

Because we all know. Billion dollar drugs that generate that billion dollars because they work. So you can't say that just because someone's gonna make money off it doesn't mean that this is not quality research. 'cause again, what is that engine that drives phase one, phase two, phase three? It's revenue.

So you have to have some understanding that there's gonna be a financial interest of somebody eventually. Otherwise, this research wouldn't be done. A lot of times that early preclinical research has no conflict of interest because those are the beginnings of the ideas. And then it's later down.

but so it's certainly important to know that just because you'll see different pharmaceutical companies that are doing clinical trials, and you'll be like, oh, okay. It doesn't mean you discount the research that is done, but you have a different lens tell

That court holds it up,

That's when trial size becomes important, right? There's some supplement companies who, do a small trial on like 10 people so now that they can have a claim, right? I have a claim that this changes that, all right, you looked at 10 people, right? okay. It's better because than nothing, because at least you believe in your product so much,

That you would invest money in doing a clinical trial, you had to have certain expertise, right? So that means you really believe in the product. So it definitely. Helps. But I wouldn't say that I would discount it entirely or blindly trust it. So this is where you're trying to analyze.

if you're thinking it's like on a scale, it's like, all right, I'll put, three blocks there and maybe one block because you're gonna make money off it, right? But this is all the analysis that you're doing on articles.

Okay.

How do we read them?

How do you read them? Okay, so let's say this was one of the articles that I had referenced in the previous episode and

was a really big one.

This is quality.

Comes in research, medical. This is the one they read.

Yeah. So again, like we start at the top, we clicked on our article.

This is, persistence of Autism spectrum disorder from early childhood through school age. All right. And we have a whole bunch of different authors, right? We have MD and PH, PhD, So I like to look at, who are the people doing the research? so we looked first at the publication.

That's a good publication. We have the title, so we kind of know. Oh, persistence. Oh, okay. Interesting. I always thought autism is just autism, right? So the title itself is like, oh, okay. Interesting. and so we look at the authors and usually down on the bottom on the first page affiliations.

I'm looking at that firstto set my mind. you have Boston Children's Hospital. We got jama, we got Boston Children's Hospital. we're in that. area, right? we're about as quality as can get. So we have a quality journal, we have a well-respected university and hospital.

And then this is the corresponding author. Sometimes I look at that like you had mentioned before, is there someone who's publishing a lot on that? This is where you might be like, all right, what is this person and what have they published on before?

So that's another, jumping off point. I wouldn't jump off that point right now 'cause I try and. Get a good understanding of one article before I start going too wide. so you gotta do a deep dive. And this is where you start to get into it.

the importance this article, this journal has this, I have the full publication here, so you're gonna obviously get more than just the abstract. I will say I think

that's not bad.

don't, look at how many pages, because you're gonna set yourself up.

there's probably at least two pages that are references, So don't worry about that. I would not look at that whatsoever. because on the first page. You can get a good enough understanding that many times you don't have to deep further

So don't look there. 'cause you might be like, oh, that article's too long, I don't wanna read it. If you think, all right, one page, one page. Like you can do it. this is important.

Still beyond our understanding level reading level.

Is this something that we can then put into AI to bring down to our language level?

So what, if you wanna bring it down, I would just, before going to AI or anything like that, I would just go to conclusions first. in an abstract, it's usually the last sentence or two. if you wanna like, get the cliff notes.

Okay. You have the title, persistence of Autism. All right. What did they find? I don't wanna be in suspense this whole time. You can just come down to the conclusions. so, you know here the, the findings of this cohort study suggests that among toddlers diagnosed with a SD baseline adaptive function and sex may be associated with persistence of a SD.

so that's a little wordy. So it's basically staying autism is not persistent throughout life, right? In a very complex way. If you then scoop up to the results, you can say, okay, 213 participants, that's a decent size, right? So now we're starting to think, okay, what did they really do here?

213. And these are things you can look at for quickly. You don't need PhD, right? You're looking at, okay, now what did they do? 213. Okay. Age, okay. Kind of irrelevant. Boys versus girls. Eh, like too many numbers. Let's keep skipping. All children with non-persistent autism.

Okay? So now they're really talking about persistent versus non-persistent autism. So we know this publication is establishing that autism is not persistent, right? so this is now an article where it's like. I've gotta understand the details, right? It's relevant.

If you're at the beginning stage of autism, your child was just diagnosed, what do I do? maybe I need to print this out, this is an investment of my time. I need to understand what this is.

So what you could do, you could copy and paste this into, some type of AI and say, give me a two to three sentence summary on what this is saying at a fifth grade level.

So you certainly could do that. I would be very careful. I would still try and figure out what the heck are they saying here. There's a lot of numbers, a lot of parentheses, I would print this out and maybe write it, but I'm old school.

So when I need to really understand something, I will print it out so I can circle it and break it down piece by piece. Everybody does it differently. people might be able to do this on their screen. they might copy and paste certain things How do you break down information?

Everyone does it differently I would print it out. They were measuring iq and all of this, this data in here. The most important part, 37% did not continue to meet diagnosis criteria for autism. In parentheses, this is a new term now, non-persistent, ASD.

this is huge. AI does have biases. ask ai, is autism permanent? Is autism lifelong? And see what it tells you, that's gonna change depending upon the version and how they update it

that's why you really wanna make sure you come to a source like this This is why I have a YouTube channel, right? this is a lot of work and most people don't like this. I happen to like this, right? that was the whole premise of my YouTube channel that I started over 10 years ago, let me take one publication, let me break it down, explain the science in like eight minutes, and teach parents how to think about it in terms of their child.

this is the analysis that has to be done, but you always wanna make sure the information you're getting is from some kind of source like this. you might wanna pull up the publication yourself. If you're like, I wanna trust X. Let me look at the publication, right? And you can kind of get a feel,

is that person, stating what is actually in the publication? And this is how you would do it

something to back this up.

that's where you can start getting into, the rest of the publication. They probably have a summary. They probably mention other studies

because I've been in the field now 13 years. I know they're gonna reference that article from 2013, that shows 10% of kids with autism lost their diagnosis. this is how the field evolves. There was research done 10 years ago, and this is also the time it takes,

this information doesn't just change overnight. Because it takes time

to follow all these different, there's 213 children, right? And they were followed over several years and it takes time to write the publication and then submitted and have it reviewed and then edits, like it all takes time.

now we're starting to get it way past what most people have the tolerance level for. So there are times where I will just skip down to the references, right? So again, you have conflicts of in interest. there was a grant so you know, nothing major that really is a red flag or anything like that.

You can start to look at references. Okay. Who are they referencing? Like this is when you're going, I would. If I was gonna start doing that, I probably would've printed it out and I'm going to tear this apart And I mean, I've done that, right? So, that would be your analysis at a PhD level, right?

But this is where you can read the conclusions more. This study suggests that a substantial percentage of individuals clinically diagnosed with autism in early childhood no longer met criteria for autism at school age. That's huge.

Yeah.

Right? parents are going to be making decisions based on old information. 37% of this cohort, of 213, that's a decent study size.

I'm not gonna expect to have a publication like this to have 10,000 data points. Not gonna happen. Who's funding this, right? There's absolutely no revenue benefit on this whatsoever for anyone.

So you have to keep that in mind that this is getting funded by different grants from maybe family foundations and things like that. And it goes on to say that higher baseline adaptive scores and female sex were associated with non-persistent autism. this non persistent autism is huge, right?

Like we have a publication now that is saying autism is not lifelong, but scientists don't use marketing speak like that, right?

non persistent what does that really mean? Like you have to think about it. Wait, non persistent, they no longer met criteria.

this is how scientists talk and this is also why it takes so long for the general public to understand it.

Because typically a pharmaceutical company, if a founding was made by this and there was a company that could make revenue. Off a finding like this, the next step they do is they start to do continuing medical education.

So they'll go to the large conferences. let's just use this as an autism example. They would go to large autism conferences, which actually there aren't many because there's no revenue for pharmaceutical companies with autism. But there's a few. And they would go there and they would host, CME credits.

They would host lunch and learns. They might start reaching out to different doctors. And that is how the information gets trickled down from the researchers at Boston Children's hospital. And it gets passed down to other doctors who are practicing and are at the front lines, but there's nobody who's making a profit off this finding at all.

And so this is why information will stay in PubMed and it won't get out to the general public. But this is exactly why I do what I do, because this is information that is vital and it changes how parents view their child, right? It changes how they advocate for them in school, how they involve them in family,

It's so different,

I know that there are so many people who write in the newspaper that don't know how to read this properly. So the misquote things. So here's the idea that if you see something mentioned, you can go to PubMed and you can research it like Dr. Lyons walked us through so that you can then look at it yourself.

Yeah.

And you don't, I really, to anyone who does not have a PhD or anyone, even with a PhD who don't like doing this, not everybody enjoys this like me don't go past the first page. There's no need. Because if you think, "oh my gosh, I have to understand" like, I get it.

 But you don't have to go past the first page I skipped through that. Right. A lot of words we have now recruitment process chart. Yeah. Numbers, paragraphs, or tables. Oh my gosh. Like, oh, who wants to do this? Oh my goodness.

It just is, there's so much data. Why is that? Oh. 'cause it's quality information

other people who want to continue research based off this.

for someone who does not like. Looking at these kinds of articles, don't go past the first page. It's not necessary.

If you wanna make sure you're getting quality information, don't go past the first page. Otherwise, it will be overwhelming that you'll have resistance to even looking at any of these articles. not everybody's like, I wanna know these details. Many people are like, I don't wanna know it.

So that's fine too. But if you feel you're gonna get overwhelmed by, all this information and you don't understand it, and it's gonna be frustrating, It could be a trigger and then you're getting irritated and then annoyed, and that's the exact opposite of what you started out to do.

Just have a rule with yourself. First page only. I'm a first page only person. Totally fine. There are many PhD researchers who are first page only as well,

Where do we find your YouTube channel? If we want to learn more dig into this, even if we're not looking for anything autism, but we're trying to figure out how to research for our own wellness needs.

you could just type my name into, YouTube and my channel will pop up. I've had it for over 15 years, and we have over 15,000 subscribers. I do have people who watch my videos who are not. Autism specific, because they do address things like inflammation.

And there are some people who really appreciate the way I'm explaining the science

and I do have people, post comments like, you know, how does this apply for lupus? and it's great that they at least understand the way I'm explaining the mechanism of action.

And then they start to say, okay, is that relevant to me? So I'm teaching parents how to apply it to their child with autism, but many people find the science that I explainrelevant.

Thank you for this. Thank you for coming on again.

If you have questions, reach out to Dr. Lyons or myself. We are happy to help you. I asked her the question at the beginning of the show because I know somebody who is looking for somebody to coach her adult son who has autism.

She helps anybody, family members, children, adult autism. if you are looking for that support, reach out to her. at the end of this, I'm going to be connecting her to that person who reached out to me asking for help. another thought that came to mind is if you are struggling to understand a research article, think about who do you know that has an upper level degree who would be willing and excited to nerd out over it and break it down to your level.

it is not a sign of you're stupid There are PhDs who don't know how to read research articles because they don't have a research understanding within their PhD. So you're not stupid. You are very smart in a totally different area. It's, we're a crayon box, right, with all different colors.

think of it that way, and we hope that you enjoyed this and that it was meaningful to you. even if you feel like you don't need this in your life right now, at some point you will. And I'm sure you know somebody who could use this, who is constantly sending you Facebook things, making it seem like it's real life and late breaking news.

Let's kind of get rid of that please and thank you.

Thank you. I'm gonna run off.

Okay. Sounds good.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope that you found the answers that you needed, and you had some amazing aha moments. Please share this episode with others because it helps us align ourselves and then better align the world so that we can seek the healing that we really are looking for as part of the legal language.

I am a certified life coach with a Bachelor's in Applied Health. That is what I am leaning on for this. This is general advice. Take it as such. See you in the next episode.