I try to put cutting-edge medical information about vitamin D on my blog. Because medical knowledge is expanding at such a fast pace, sometimes articles only appear in the online form of the medical literature, before they even show up in the paper publication, or in some cases even before they show up in the journal’s online publication.

In these situations, the article abstract is only available on a website called "PUBMED". PUBMED stands for public medicine. This is the online version which is now freely available to all of us,  of what used to be called "INDEX MEDICUS." Now all the medical information that used to be only available to physicians, is available to the whole world instantly. This is in keeping with the speed of our Internet age.

In these cases where the article I am talking about, is not published either in paper or in the journal’s online website, I am not able to give you a link directly to the article on the web.

Every article that is published on pub that has what is called a "PUBMED ID." This is abbreviated PMID.

Every medical aricle that is or is going to be published,l has a unique identifier PMID.

Therefore when I am referring you to an article which is only available on PUBMED, you will see me giving the PUBMED ID instead of giving you a link to the actual article. Of course at some subsequent time that article will become available both in print and online.

To access an article that I reference in this way just go to http:// www.pubmed.com. Copy and paste the PUBMED ID that I give you in my article, into the top search bar and click enter and it will take you right to the article that I am referring to.

I hope that this is helpful for those of you have asked me to explain PUBMED ID.