About EBM

Traditionally, doctors learnt from past experience, prevailing practice, professional training and peer opinion. However, in nowadays world, we tend to turn our focus to medical research for updating our medical practice. Many would not know where and how to search for the appropriate and relevant medical information as the sources are so vast, numerous, and diversified. Therefore, "Critical appraisal" of the medical literature is very important in helping us to find the most clinically relevant, applicable and evidence-based information for our problems.

The aim of EBM is to improve the quality of clinical judgments. The evidence is obtained by a combined effort of research data collection, analysis, interpretation and integration into our daily practices. The research method need should be randomised and which the patients view and the doctor's observation and incorporation for data analysis. It is important that all the advances in medicine should be proven to do more good than harm before being put into clinical practice.

As mentioned before, there is so much medical information available in our surrounding now that sometimes we, as busy clinicians, do not know where to begin and what to believe. Therefore, it is important that we desire some effective, efficient information retrieval tools so we could use them with ease and confidence.

What is Evidence-Based Medicine?

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is the integration of best research evidence with clinical expertise and patient values. (by Sackett et al.)

Best research evidence - clinically relevant research, often from the basic sciences of medicine, but especially from patient centered clinical research into the accuracy and precision of diagnostic tests (including the clinical examination), the power of prognostic markers, and the efficacy and safety of therapeutic, rehabilitative, and preventive regimens. New evidence from clinical research both invalidates previously accepted diagnostic tests and treatments and replaces them with new ones that are more powerful, more accurate, more efficacious, and safer.

Clinical expertise - the ability to use our clinical skills and past experience to rapidly identify each patient's unique health state and diagnosis, their individual risks and benefits of potential interventions, and their personal values and expectations.

Patient values - the unique preferences, concerns and expectations each patient brings to a clinical encounter and which must be integrated into clinical decisions if they are to serve the patient.

When these three elements are integrated, clinicians and patients form a diagnostic and therapeutic alliance which optimizes clinical outcomes and quality of life.