Evidence Based Medicine

According to the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, "Evidence-based medicine is the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients


Evidence-based medicine attempts to objectively evaluate the quality of clinical research by critically assessing techniques reported by researchers in their publications.
•Trial design considerations. High-quality studies have clearly-defined eligibility criteria, and have minimal missing data.
•Generalizability considerations. Studies may only be applicable to narrowly-defined patient populations, and may not be generalizable to clinical practice.
•Followup. Sufficient time for defined outcomes to occur can influence the study outcomes and the statistical power of a study to detect differences between a treatment and control arm.
•Power. A mathematical calculation can determine if the number of patients is sufficient to detect a difference between treatment arms. A negative study may reflect a lack of benefit, or simply a lack of sufficient quantities of patients to detect a difference.