Evidence-Based Medicine Practice
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
An Evidence-Based Medicine Practice is a biomedical practice that is an evidence-based practice.
- AKA: Clinical Medicine, Scientific Medicine.
- Context:
- …
- Example(s):
- Counter-Example(s):
- See: Medicine, Decision-Making, Evidence, Empirical Evidence, Meta-Analysis, Systematic Review, Clinical Study, Case-Control Study.
References
2015
- (Wikipedia, 2015) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/evidence-based_medicine Retrieved:2015-6-4.
- Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is a form of medicine that aims to optimize decision-making by emphasizing the use of evidence from well designed and conducted research. Although all medicine based on science has some degree of empirical support, EBM goes further, classifying evidence by its epistemologic strength and requiring that only the strongest types (coming from meta-analyses, systematic reviews, and randomized controlled trials) can yield strong recommendations; weaker types (such as from case-control studies) can yield only weak recommendations. The term was originally used to describe an approach to teaching the practice of medicine and improving decisions by individual physicians. Use of the term rapidly expanded to include a previously described approach that emphasized the use of evidence in the design of guidelines and policies that apply to populations ("evidence-based practice policies"). It has subsequently spread to describe an approach to decision making that is used at virtually every level of health care as well as other fields, yielding the broader term evidence-based practice. Whether applied to medical education, decisions about individuals, guidelines and policies applied to populations, or administration of health services in general, evidence-based medicine advocates that to the greatest extent possible, decisions and policies should be based on evidence, not just the beliefs of practitioners, experts, or administrators. It thus tries to assure that a clinician's opinion, which may be limited by knowledge gaps or biases, is supplemented with all available knowledge from the scientific literature so that best practice can be determined and applied. It promotes the use of formal, explicit methods to analyze evidence and make it available to decision makers. It promotes programs to teach the methods to medical students, practitioners, and policy makers. The term "evidence-based medicine" was first coined and developed by doctors at McMaster University Medical School in the 1980s.