Practice guidelines and cookbook medicine—Who are the cooks?

Practice guidelines and cookbook medicine--who are the cooks?

In in era of managed competition, cost-elective medical care becomes a major goal of any health care delivery system. Such a system will generate practice guidelines to accomplish this goal . For example, in our own medical center, the Division of General Internal Medicine has just written guidelines on the proper use of echocardiography in their prepaid and health care populations . Other guid...

Credibility, cookbook medicine, and common sense: guidelines and the college.

vJuidelines and their siblings (protocols and algorithms) are not new (3). However, their popularity has burgeoned, especially when compared with their more restrictive first cousins (standards, prediction rules, and decision rules) (Table 1). They have been hailed as the salvation from the wide variations in medical care and simultaneously lamented as harbingers of the ruination of medicine as...

From America: cookbook medicine or food for thought: practice guidelines development in the USA.

How Useful are Laboratory Practice Guidelines?

Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) relating to laboratory diagnostic testing are increasingly produced with the aim of standardizing practice and improving patient care based on the best available evidence. However, the production of a CPG is merely the first step in the process of getting evidence into practice, to be undertaken by laboratories and other stakeholders. This process should eval...

PRACTICE GUIDELINES Practice Guidelines for the Management of Pain

OPTIONS 1. Control of burn pain must begin upon initiation of medical care. Once intravenous access is gained and resuscitation started, intravenous opioids should be administered. The opioid dose occasionally exceeds the standard weight-based recommendations and is necessary to achieve adequate pain control. 2. Opioids, along with other adjuncts such as benzodiazepines, are used to control bac...