ABSTRACT
Throughout the history of medicine, physicians have tried to formulate general rules based on their experience, and express them in lectures, books and journals. Over the years, however, the mass of evidence has been accumulating so rapidly in all fields of medicine that no active clinician is able to cope with it. From this situation stems the movement of evidence-based medicine (EBM), which aims at helping clinicians to systematise, analyse and draw conclusions from currently available external evidence. The process of EBM has been vastly facilitated through the ‘Cochrane method’ of evaluating evidence, and by modern computer technology.
