Evidence based medicine and the medical curriculum

doi:10.1136/bmj.a1253

Published 24 September 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a1253
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a1253

Editorials

Evidence based medicine and the medical curriculum

The search engine is now as essential as the stethoscope

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

What we know about diseases, diagnosis, and effective treatmentsis growing rapidly. Today health professionals cannot solelyrely on what they were first taught if they want to do the bestfor their patients. It has repeatedly been shown that clinicalperformance deteriorates over time.¹ A commitment to lifelonglearning must be integral to ethical professional practice.However, the speed of the increase in knowledge—more than2000 new research papers are added to Medline each day—representsa challenge.² The skills needed to find potentially relevantstudies quickly and reliably, to separate the wheat from thechaff, and to apply sound research findings to patient carehave today become as essential as skills with a stethoscope.

The advent of "evidence based medicine" saw an explosion ofsystematic reviews and guidelines but much less change in themedical curriculum.³ ⁴ Although evidence based guidelines mayhelp clinicians in selected areas, they cannot cover . . . [Full text of this article]

Paul Glasziou, professor of evidence based medicine¹, Amanda Burls, director of postgraduate programmes in evidence based health care¹, Ruth Gilbert, professor of clinical epidemiology²

¹ Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, Department of Primary Health Care, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 7LF, ² Institute of Child Health, London WC1N 1EH

paul.glasziou@dphpc.ox.ac.uk

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Rapid Responses:

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