A webquest for medical students and residents
Welcome to the "What's all this about Evidence-Based Medicine?" Webquest.
For those of you new to the idea of webquests, you may find more information about them at the Webquest Page at San Diego State University.
Use the links at the top to navigate around this site.
This webquest is intended to introduce you to some of the thoughts about the nature of evidence-based medicine and its place in medical practice today. The term evidence-based medicine was first used in the early 1990's and was coined by a working group at McMaster University's Clinical Epidemiology department. The professors associated with this department, David Sackett, Brian Haynes and Gordon Guyatt to name a few, thought that clinical epidemiology - the use of statistical methods and epidemiological principles in clinical practice - was becoming a forgotten art. They began to develop a set of simple tools and paradigms for clinicians to use to enable them to integrate research evidence into their practices.
Evidence-based medicine has become very popular in medical systems today, and it's hard to be in medicine without hearing the term. But what exactly do people mean when they say something like, "this decision is evidence-based," or "she really practices evidence-based medicine"? While there probably isn't a universal definition of evidence-based medicine, there certainly has been a lot of writing about what it is and how and why we should use it as physicians.
This webquest will help you understand evidence-based medicine better, not because you'll find the one true defintion, but instead because you'll see what it means to different people through their writings. You'll find these writings by using a tool that has helped spur the popularity, and the feasibility of evidence-based medicine - the Internet.