ABSTRACT
The rapid proliferation in medical knowledge and the relative ease of access to this information have resulted in healthcare practitioners and consumers being overwhelmed with the volume of material that has to be evaluated from a utility perspective. Furthermore, the decision making process for practitioners is becoming increasingly reliant on using valid evidence to develop clinical care plans. Learning to access, interpret and apply this knowledge appropriately may be a daunting task but is fundamentally important to evidence based medicine, a concept that has a historical background dating to 1910 when it was reported that the new foundation of medicine was based on biomedical sciences, which, at that time, served as the best available evidence on which medical decisions were made.1 The present day focus on evidence based medicine has evolved significantly and relies on a systematic approach to gathering and appraising the evidence and applying the results of such a review to clinical care. It has been defined as the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of the best evidence that is currently available to make decisions about the care of individual patients.2 This definition emphasizes that judgment is required on the part of the clinician to incorporate into clinical care the evidence, that has been sifted and rendered valid after evaluating it using the necessary tools within an explicit and rigorous framework. By applying the rules of evidence to systematically gathered information, it is anticipated that the practice of medicine will lead to an improvement in patient outcomes and be more cost effective.
