How to research disease and health topics

The National Institute of Health (NIH) is the U.S. Government agency that is the main source of funding for medical research in the U.S. and also happens to be the largest source of funding for medical research in the world. It is an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, which also oversees the FDA.  The NIH invested over $30.1 billion in research in 2014 to 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 universities, medical schools and research institutions in every U.S. State and throughout the world. In addition, the NIH has 6,000 scientists in its own laboratories in Bethesda, Maryland doing its own medical research.

The NIH is therefore the best clearinghouse for research studies being done on almost every medical and health topic in the world.  The NIH is the first place that we at Seagate look to find the most current and also historical studies on any health topic, disease, and possible cures being investigated whether from natural products or from pharmaceutical drugs.

Go to the NIH search engine called PubMed and type any term into their search box. As an example, if you type in “Olive Leaf Extract”, their drop down menu will appear giving you these choices of article topics below that you can choose, with each topic offering hundreds of articles for you to read:

• olive leaf extract hypertension
• olive leaf extract antiviral
• olive leaf extract antibacterial
• olive leaf extract review
• olive leaf extract diabetes
• olive leaf extract antifungal
• olive leaf extract skin
• olive leaf extract and hypertension
• olive leaf extract and diabetes
• olive leaf extract blood pressure
• olive leaf extract liver
• olive leaf extract cancer
• olive leaf extract virus

We at Seagate are not making any claim that olive leaf extract can do any of these things that the NIH is studying and publishing for you to read. The irony is that the FDA does not allow us to even link our webpage to any medical study that their own parent agency has funded.  However you now have the vehicle to search and study the results yourself, uncensored.

These two yellow Tube Corals, also know as Sun Coral or Orange Cup Coral, are very common in the Caribbean and in this case, along Belize. These are hard corals which are inhabited by polyps that secrete calcium carbonate in order to attach themselves to the tube. As long as conditions are favorable to the polyps, the coral will continue to grow. In this photo, the Coral Tubes sit in an area of “coral bleaching”, where most of the coral in the vicinity has died and shows a whitening or bleached effect.  This bleaching can be the result of many different factors including increased water temperatures, higher salinity levels, pollution or local sedimentation …. which can kill off the live polyps and result in the destruction of sections of a reef. Although there has been the recent scare about global-warming which has definitely caused major destruction to reefs around the world, the bleaching effect on local areas of corals has been observed for over a hundred years. Usually the polyps and the corals do recover when water temperatures become more favorable.

However, it has been only recently that such massive bleaching events have been classified throughout the world’s oceans. Sometimes, when taking these sorts of photos, I hope that I am not recording these reefs for future generations to see in photos rather than on their own dives.