How to Read a Paper: The Basics of Evidence-based Medicine
Editor: Trisha Greenhalgh
When confronted with the term Evidence Based Medicine, clinicians have a range of responses from plain ignorance and humorous denial, through mild irritation to indignant anger. However, logic dictates and patients demand that clinical decisions should be based on the most recently available, and the most reliable, published evidence. Whilst few doctors would deny this, the ultimate truth is that many doctors are unaware of how to find evidence and, having found some, are then unable to judge the validity of what they have found.
Trisha Greenhalgh’s book, which was first published in 1997, is above all a user-friendly guide to the interpretation of clinical papers. However, this book is so much more. The easy-to-read chapters also help the reader to master the art of the literature search and show how to compare the value, or importance, of different clinical papers. The mysteries of meta-analyses are unravelled and the chapter on statistics for the non-statistician is comprehensive, yet simple. This book is well written and is laid out in short chapters, such that it can be dipped into episodically.
Whilst a clinician will always make individual management decisions that are based on the specific details of a patient’s case, the practice of Evidence Based Medicine remains the backbone of effective clinical practice. This deceptively simple book is an excellent introduction to this area of clinical medicine, and for many clinicians may be the only guide that they will require in their day-to-day practice.
| Publisher: | BMJ Books
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| 2nd Edition
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| ISBN: 0-7279-1578-9
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| Reviewer: | Dr Adrian Boonin
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