What is Examine?
Since 2011, we’ve been tracking and analyzing tens of thousands of nutrition and supplement studies in order to help our readers get healthier. The content that Examine provides includes:
- Health taxonomy connecting 25 categories, 400+ conditions and goals, and 1000+ health outcomes and metrics to over 500 interventions, primarily based on nutrition and supplementation.
- Answers to over 1,500 frequently asked questions.
- Study Summaries: quick breakdown of 150+ new nutrition studies every month.
- Examine Database: collated research and efficacy grades on over 10,000 human in vivo studies. For example, creatine.
- Supplement Guides: step-by-step directions on what to take, when to take, and how much to take for different health goals.
- Citations for all claims and results.
We are committed to uplifting community health by providing senior and student discounts, as well as giving a part of sale proceeds to charities focused on reducing the barrier to health care access. We find that providing trustworthy, unbiased health information to as many people as possible in a community ultimately empowers everyone to get healthier and work toward their goals.
Does Examine have any conflicts of interest?
We have over 20 researchers on the team and strict contractual obligations ensuring no conflicts of interest — 100% of our revenue comes from subscription revenue; no ads, sponsorships, consulting, services, physical products, or anything else.
What do students and faculty use Examine for?
Examine is a trustworthy resource that provides helpful information for a variety of needs:
- Examine makes it easy to look up the research on any combinations of health interventions, conditions, and outcomes. Study demographics are included with this information to help determine relevancy.
- Our work is designed to help our readers stay on top of the latest nutrition research. We filter over a thousand studies every month to curate the most noteworthy research. These studies are spread across our 25 categories, allowing readers to focus specifically on the new research that applies to them and their goals.
- Readers who need step-by-step directions for supplementation can find exactly what they need, tailored to their health goals.
- Health professionals use Examine to quickly and easily look up the answers to health, nutrition, and supplementation questions they get from their patients and clients.
What advantages does Examine offer over traditional learning and training resources?
Examine is designed to stay accurate and up to date in an always-changing world in which information moves faster than ever before. The Examine database and website make most reference resources obsolete because printed materials go out of date when new research is published, and they're difficult to use in a flexible way. Information on Examine is organized and interlinked in a way that makes it easy to find all relevant information on a specific topic, whether a reader needs a quick overview or a deep dive. For example, looking up 'Blood Pressure' on Examine provides the most relevant recent research on the topic, an explanatory overview, supplements and nutrients relevant to the topic, and all other health conditions and outcomes that are connected to blood pressure.
Can Examine help community members without consistent internet access?
Examine offers several downloadable resources that readers can take home with them after downloading or printing at their library. These include the Study Summaries, the Examine Database, and the Supplement Guides.
How does Examine compare to NatMedPro?
NatMedPro, aka Natural Medicines Database (NMD), is designed to provide super quick information for pharmacists and professionals working with pharmaceuticals, focusing on interactions and efficacy. Their research team is a small team made up exclusively of pharmacists.
Examine is much easier to use than NMD because of our hierarchal setup. Interventions are classified by type, like supplements vs. diets, and we have separate pages on conditions, health goals, and specific measurable health outcomes. This allows us to provide a greater depth of information while staying organized and making it easy to find exactly what you're looking for.
We analyze each of the individual trials that inform efficacy understanding to provide detailed information like population characteristics, which allows practitioners to determine if specific evidence applies to their patients. For example, a trial that only included postmenopausal women probably doesn't provide relevant results for a young male patient. The Examine team is multidisciplinary and pretty large, ranging from pharmacists to dietitians to public health researchers to lab scientists and physicians. This range means no details slip through the cracks, and even niche scientific concepts can be reviewed and broken down accurately for our readers.
Click here to learn more about Examine vs NatMedPro.
How easy is it to set up Examine+ access?
Incredibly easy.
We can provide access based on IP, and can authenticate and work with either EZproxy or OpenAthens.
We can also provide customized signup links to limit access to only approved accounts.
We have an experienced web development team and can customize to any technological specifications.
Our researchers would also be happy to conduct a live session with your audience to highlight how to best utilize Examine.
How do you find and evaluate clinical trials?
To collect studies, we use several hundred pubmed search strings, each focusing on a specific intervention, health condition, or measurable health outcome.
We have a few systematic review specialists on the team who create these search strings, and we also contract with a librarian who has a masters in nutrition to help us fine tune and update the search strings over time.
The process is similar to that done by federally designated Evidence Based Practice centers that conduct systematic reviews.
The search strings are automatically run at least once a month to collect new studies, and then those studies are put into a queue for data extraction. We learn about potential new topics to cover by searching the highest-impact journals in a few different nutrition and supplement related fields, surveying users around once a quarter, and following Clinicaltrials.gov as well as Twitter accounts of researchers. We also communicate with people at Cochrane and a couple other centers on occasion to make sure we're on the right track.
Click here to learn more about how Examine calculates evidence grades.
How much does it cost?
Whether you wish to purchase access for specific faculty members or your student body (FTEs), we can work within your budgetary requirements.
Can I check out Examine+ myself?
Please use this special link to create an account and you will get instant access to all of our subscription content. This page has more information on what is unlocked.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Here's a video by one of our researchers on using Examine: