Evidence-based medicine?!... What for?

By M. Pelaezluna. Revista de Gastroenterología de México, 2012

2,525 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To quote Sir William Osler’s essay The Student Life, ‘‘The hardest conviction to get into the mind of a beginner is that the education upon which he is engaged is not a college course, not a medical course, but a life course.. . ..’’ After graduation, physicians face different challenges; one of them is to offer the best available management to their patients. In order to accomplish this, doctors must keep their knowledge updated. Good intentions are not enough; every year hundreds of journals publish thousands of manuscripts. Such a large amount of available information might produce anxiety or even apathy, not only due to our human incapability to read, memorize, and integrate every single journal or article that is published, but also because for many physicians, it is extremely difficult to select quality research, to interpret, and to apply such new knowledge to everyday cases. This is probably one of the many reasons why keeping medical knowledge up to date has become an exhausting battle. According to Choudrhy et al. a physician’s clinical performance decreases significantly with age and duration in practice; in other words, the longer the time since graduation, the poorer the knowledge, and the worse the quality of health care provided. Therefore, evidence based-medicine (EBM) has developed as a tool whose purpose is to help physicians keep up to date, expand their knowledge, and improve clinical practice. Studies also suggest that practicing EBM might prevent the unnecessary expense of potentially inadequate prescriptions, promote critical thinking, identify and stimulate good practices, and eliminate those that are ineffective or harmful. EBM has been defined as the integration of the best available research evidence with clinical expertise and patient concerns and values. Thus, in order to practice EBM, physicians should be aware of their own limitations and knowledge gaps, as well as of their patients’ interests, so they can ask the right questions and then search for the most adequate information. As easy as this might sound, it is insufficient (good intentions are not enough); the critical appraisal and individualization of the consulted evidence are equally important. Only then, will the practitioner be able to keep updated and answer relevant clinical questions that result in appropriate and high quality health care.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/31a053f17b9a6b9f6613fa57c1b06b21fe4c9677

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Citations in the corpus

How can systematic reviews incorporate qualitative research? A critical perspective (2006, background): “EBM Working Group (1992) ‘Evidence-based Medicine’, Journal of the American Medical Association 268: 2420–5.”
The PICO strategy for the research question construction and evidence search. (2007, background): “As the EBM precepts were incorporated into other disciplines, it started to be called Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) (2) .”
Selected Phlebology Abstracts (2011, background): “Evidence-based medicine is the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of the current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients.(14) Guidelines for the care of patients with varicose veins, as recommended in this report, are based on scientific evidence.”
Exploring the relationship between effective and reflective practice in applied sport psychology (2010, background): “Certainly, the view that interventions should be based on the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the provision of service delivery is indicative of the recent development of professional status within the field (Sackett, 1998).”
Generating translatable evidence to improve patient care: the contribution of human factors (2020, neutral): “Evidence-based medicine requires that three elements be taken into account when caring for a patient; the evidence, the patient perspective and the doctor's experience (Sackett, 1997).”
Interventional techniques: evidence-based practice guidelines in the management of chronic spinal pain. (2007, background): “Evidence-based medicine is defined as the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients (103).”
Watson: Beyond Jeopardy! (2013, methodology): “…the differential diagnosis includes links back to the original evidence used by DeepQA to produce its confidence scores and supports the adoption of evidence-based medicine (EBM) " which aims to apply the best available evidence gained from the scientific method to clinical decision making " [14].”
Systematic Review in Software Engineering (2005, background): “It then consists in constructing definitions that allow the researcher to establish a distinction between the relevant and the irrelevant studies for the specific purpose of the investigation.”
Large language models are few-shot clinical information extractors (2022, background): “Evidence-based medicine (EBM) involves synthesizing findings from across clinical research studies, but the current rapid clip of research makes it nearly impossible to keep up with all studies (Sackett, 1997; Bastian et al., 2010).”
Scientific research ontology to support systematic review in software engineering (2007, background): “Table 1 Level and source of evidence [51]”
Mining Electronic Health Records: A Survey (2017, background): “The predominant medical practice framework today is evidence-based medicine[Sackett 2000].”