SUMMARY
Evidence based medicine (EBM) is the conscientious, explicit, judicious and reasonable use of
modern, best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. EBM integrates clinical experience and patient values with the best available research information. It is a
movement which aims to increase the use of high quality clinical research in clinical decision
making. EBM requires new skills of the clinician, including efficient literature-searching, and
the application of formal rules of evidence in evaluating the clinical literature. The practice
of evidence-based medicine is a process of lifelong, self-directed, problem-based learning in
which caring for one’s own patients creates the need for clinically important information about
diagnosis, prognosis, therapy and other clinical and health care issues. It is not “cookbook”
with recipes, but its good application brings cost-effective and better health care. The key
difference between evidence-based medicine and traditional medicine is not that EBM considers the evidence while the latter does not. Both take evidence into account; however, EBM
demands better evidence than has traditionally been used. One of the greatest achievements of
evidence-based medicine has been the development of systematic reviews and meta-analyses,
methods by which researchers identify multiple studies on a topic, separate the best ones
and then critically analyze them to come up with a summary of the best available evidence.
The EBM-oriented clinicians of tomorrow have three tasks: a) to use evidence summaries in
clinical practice; b) to help develop and update selected systematic reviews or evidence-based
guidelines in their area of expertise; and c) to enrol patients in studies of treatment, diagnosis
and prognosis on which medical practice is based.