What is evidence-based medicine?

Introduction: Three challenges that physicians and decision makers in the health care systems have to meet are a remarkable proportion of medical decisions without a sufficient base of scientific evidence, a slow and opaque process of integrating scientific knowledge into medical practice and a steadily decreasing half-life period of the medical knowledge. Discussion: During the last two decades, a number of projects have faced these problems and forced the development of evidence-based medicine (EBM). This concept claims the explicit conscientious use of current evidence from clinical research combined with the personal expertise in the process of medical decision making. The following article explains the main steps of practising and teaching EBM illustrated by a clinical example.