In February 2004, American Family Physician (AFP), the Journal of the American Board of Family Practice (JABFP), and the Journal of Family Practice (JFP) will simultaneously publish an article titled “Strength of Recommendation Taxonomy (SORT): A Patient-centered Approach to Grading Evidence in the Medical Literature.” The purpose of the article is to present the SORT system, which was created ...

Clinical decision-making in everyday medical care is not evidencebased because the evidence base is too vast to learn and too complex to use. The lack of evidence-based decision-making generates poor outcomes for patients but high costs for care. Separate from issues related to using a very large knowledge base, progress in medicine at the clinical level is inhibited by the high cost of clinica...

1 Nerad JA, Kersten RC, Neuhaus RW, et al. Classification and management of eyelid disorders: ectropion. In: Nerad JA, Kersten RC, Neuhaus RW, et al, eds. Basic and clinical science course: orbit, eyelids, and lacrimal system. San Francisco: American Academy of Ophthalmology, 1997:142–8. 2 Bashour M, Harvey J. Causes of involutional ectropion and entropion—age-related tarsal changes are the key...

Inspired by the success of evidence-based medicine, environmental scholars and practitioners have grown enthusiastic about applying a similar evidencebased approach to solve some of the world’s most pressing environmental problems. An important component of the evidence-based movement is the empirical evaluation of program and policy impacts. Impact evaluations draw heavily from recent advances...

Postherpetic neuralgia (PHN) is a form of refractory chronic neuralgia that, despite the importance of prevention, currently lacks any effective prophylaxis. The efficacy of live zoster vaccine in preventing PHN was recently reported [1]. However, this vaccine appeared to be of limited use in prophylaxis[2]. PHN has a variety of symptoms and significantly affects patient quality of life [3-12]....

Evidence based medicine Evidence-based medicine relies mainly on the findings from clinical trials, and to minimise selection bias such trials should ideally be randomised. As the results of clinical studies are rarely identical, the fairest judgement on the effectiveness of a therapeutic intervention is generated through systematic review of clinical trials. Systematic reviews have to demonstr...

Using machine-interpretable clinical guidelines to support evidencebased medicine promotes the quality of medical care. In this demonstration, we present the Digital Electronic Guidelines Library (DeGeL), a comprehensive framework, including a Web-based guideline repository and a suite of tools, to support the use of automated guidelines for medical care, research, and quality assessment. Recen...

The gradual transition from the long-standing use of monodrug therapy in classical medicine to the new concept of a multidrug and multitarget therapy has great implications for the research strategies of natural products chemistry and phytomedicine. The rationalization of the new strategies, however, requires great efforts in: standardization of monoand multiphytopreparations using all availabl...

Background and aims: The rapid growth and specialization in Medical Sciences increase the volume of information and therefore make physician problems and difficulty to access reliable information. Physicians can`t decide only according to selfknowledge, and should refer to the new texts and references. Clinical librarian role as a key chain in evidence-based medicine can`t be ignored. Clinical ...