LibGuides: WHSL Evidence-Based Medicine: Evidence-Based Medicine and Practice

What is Evidence-Based Medicine?

Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) combines individual clinical expertise with the best available evidence from clinical research and systematic reviews in order to make decisions about the care of individual patients. Clinical expertise results from the proficiency and judgment that the individual clinician acquires through clinical experience and practice. Clinical evidence comes from patient-centered clinical research which investigates the accuracy and precision of diagnostic tests, the efficacy and safety of therapeutic regimes, and the reliability of prognostic indicators. The powerful combination of clinical expertise and documented evidence results in safer, more effective and accurate care of the patient. Documented evidence comes from reliable literature sources.

According to David L. Sackett, author of Evidence-based Medicine: How to Practice and Teach EBM, the practice of EBM is a process of life-long, self-directed learning in which caring for the patient creates the need for clinically important information about diagnosis, prognosis, therapy and other clinical and health care issues.

EBM is a process that involves the following steps:

Construct a pertinent answerable question from a clinical case
Plan and carry out a search of the clinical literature (using sources such as PubMed, ACP Journal, Cochrane Database, etc.) that filters out irrelevant information
Critically appraise the retrieved literature for validity and usefulness
Apply the results of this appraisal to your clinical practice
Evaluate your performance

About EBM - Print Textbooks

Essential evidence-based medicine by Dan Mayer
Call Number: WB 102 MAY
Evidence-based medicine : how to practice and teach EBM by David L. Sackett
Call Number: WB 102 EVI
Asking answerable clinical questions -- How to find current best evidence and have current best evidence find us -- Diagnosis and screening -- Prognosis -- Therapy -- Harm -- Guidelines -- Teaching methods -- Evaluation.
Evidence-based medicine toolkit by Carl Heneghan
Call Number: WB 102 HEN
Asking answerable questions -- Finding the evidence : how to get the most from your searching -- Critical appraisal guidelines -- Appraising systematic reviews -- Appraising diagnosis articles -- Appraising articles on harm/aetiology -- Appraising prognosis studies -- Appraising therapy articles -- Appraising qualitative studies -- Appraising economic evaluations -- Applying the evidence -- Evidence-based medicine : glossary of terms -- Selected evidence-based healthcare resources on the web -- Levels of evidence -- Study designs.
How to read a paper : the basics of evidence based medicine by Trisha Greenhalgh
Call Number: W 20.5 GRE
Users' guides to the medical literature : a manual for evidence-based clinical practice by The Evidence-Based Medicine Working Group, ed. by Gordon Guyatt, Drummond Rennie.
Call Number: WB 102 USE
This book grew out of a series of 25 articles published in JAMA between 1993 and 2000.

EBM Tutorials from Duke University

Duke University Medical Center Library has excellent EBM tutorials. Permission to reproduce these guides under a Creative Commons non-commercial share alike 4.0 license is gratefully acknowledged.

Click here to access these guides.

Useful Databases about EBM

JAMA Evidence
JAMAevidence helps decision makers identify the best available evidence by providing guides to the systematic consideration of the validity, importance, and applicability of claims about the assessment of health problems and the outcomes of health care.

Articles about EBM

Journal of the America Oestopathic Association (JAOA) EBM series