Essential Evidence-Based Medicine

Dan Mayer is a Retired Professor of Emergency Medicine from Albany Medical College in Albany, New York, USA. He developed and taught the highly successful longitudinal four-year required medical student course called Evidence Based Health Care. He is one of the founders of the Evidence-Based Healthcare and Implementation Section of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine. Barnet Eskin has been a practicing Emergency Medicine physician for thirty-six years and teaches Emergency Medicine Residents, Pediatric Emergency Medicine Fellows and medical students in the Emergency Department of Morristown Medical Center in Morristown, NJ, USA. He is Associate Professor at the Sidney Kimmel Medical School of Jefferson University in Philadelphia, PA. David Nunan is Director of the Master's programme in Evidence-Based Health Care Teaching and Education and Senior Researcher and Educator in EBHC at the University of Oxford. He leads the teaching programme in EBHC including the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine's 'Teach the Teachers' course.

• Preface; Foreword by Sir Muir Gray; Acknowledgments; 1. A brief history of medicine and statistics; 2. What is evidence-based medicine?; 3. Causation; 4. The medical literature: an overview; 5. Scientific integrity and the responsible conduct of research John E. Kaplan; 6. Study design and strength of evidence; 7. Searching the medical literature Elizabeth Irish and Nia Roberts; 8. Instruments and measurements: precision and validity; 9. Sources of bias; 10. Review of basic statistics; 11. Hypothesis testing; 12. Type I errors and number needed to treat; 13. Negative studies and Type II errors; 14. Risk assessment; 15. Adjustment and multivariate analysis; 16. Randomized clinical trials; 17. Meta-analysis and systematic reviews; 18. Critical appraisal of qualitative research studies Steven R. Simon; 19. Applicability and strength of evidence; 20. Communicating evidence to patients Shobhina G. Chheda and Samantha Murray-Bainer; 21. EBM and the media; 22. An overview of decision making in medicine; 23. Sources of error in the clinical encounter; 24. The use of diagnostic tests; 25. Utility and characteristics of diagnostic tests: likelihood ratios, sensitivity, and specificity; 26. Bayes' theorem, predictive values, post-test probabilities, and interval likelihood ratios; 27. Comparing tests and using ROC curves; 28. Incremental gain and the threshold approach to diagnostic testing; 29. Sources of bias and critical appraisal of studies of diagnostic tests; 30. Screening tests; 31. Survival analysis and studies of prognosis; 32. Decision analysis and quantifying patient values; 33. Cost-effectiveness analysis; 34. Practice guidelines and clinical prediction rules; Appendix 1. Levels of evidence and grades of recommendations; Appendix 2. Overview of critical appraisal; Appendix 3. Commonly used statistical tests; Appendix 4. Formulas; Appendix 5. Proof of Bayes' theorem; Appendix 6. Using balance sheets to calculate thresholds; Appendix 7. Searching Tools; Glossary and acronyms; Bibliography; Index.