Evidence Based Medicine PDF and Levels of Evidence Using PICO
STUDENT OF ADVANCE POST GRADUATE DIPLOMA IN PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY (APGDPM) JAMES LIND INSTITUTE,INDIA. THE OBJECTIVE OF THIS PROJECT WORK IS TO KNOW WHAT IS EVIDENCE BASE MEDICINE AND EXPLAINING THE PICO METHOD IN DETAIL.
INTRODUCTION.
What is EBM?
Evidence-based medicine is the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients.
Without current best evidence, practice risks becoming rapidly out of date, to the detriment of patients. Evidence-based medicine is not restricted to randomised trials and meta-analyses. It involves tracking down the best external evidence with which to answer our clinical questions.
The core activities at the root of evidence-based medicine can be identified as:
• a questioning approach to practice leading to scientific experimentation
• meticulous observation, enumeration, and analysis replacing anecdotal case description, for instance, EBSCO’s Dynamed. http://www.ebscohost.com/dynamed recording and cataloguing the evidence for systematic retrieval.
What is the PICO method?
PICO is a method of putting together a search strategy that allows you to take a more evidence based approach to your literature searching when you are searching bibliographic databases like Medline (OVID), PubMed and Embase
What is Evidence-based practice (EBP)?
Evidence-based practice (EBP) is an interdisciplinary approach to clinical practice that has been gaining ground following its formal introduction in 1992. It started in medicine as evidence-based medicine (EBM) and spread to other fields such as dentistry, nursing, psychology, education, library and information science and other fields.
• It started in medicine as evidence-based medicine (EBM) and spread to other fields such as dentistry, nursing, psychology, education, library, and information science and other fields. Its basic principles are that all practical decisions made should
1) be based on research studies and
2) that these research studies are selected and interpreted according to some specific norms characteristic for EBP.
• Typically such norms disregard theoretical and qualitative studies and consider quantitative studies according to a narrow set of criteria of what counts as evidence.
• If such a narrow set of methodological criteria are not applied, it is better instead just to speak of it.
Much of the credit for today’s EBP techniques belongs to Archie Cochrane, an epidemiologist, author of the book, Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services.
Cochrane suggested that because resources would always be limited, they should be used to provide forms of health care which had been shown in properly designed evaluations to be effective.]Cochrane maintained that the most reliable evidence was that which came from randomised controlled trials (RCTs).
One of the main reasons that EBPs have been so successfully incorporated into treatment services is the vast amount of studies linking clients’ improved health outcomes and the general attitude that treatments should be based in scientific evidence (Institute of Medicine, 2001; Sackett & Haynes, 1995).
Evidence based medicine: what it is and what it isn’t: PubMed: 8555924 | PDF (0.5MB)
Good doctors and health professional’s use both individual clinical expertise and the best available external evidence, and neither alone is enough. Without clinical expertise, practice risks becoming tyrannised by evidence, for even excellent external evidence may be inapplicable to or inappropriate for an individual patient.
