SY 01-2 SHOULD WE ONLY COUNT RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED TRIALS (RCTs) FOR CLINICAL PRACTICE GUIDELINES?

Evidence based medicine, EBM is an approach to medical practice intended to optimize decision making by use of evidence from well designed and well conducted research.EBM classifies evidence by its strength and requires that only the strongest types (RCTs, meta-analyses, and systematic reviews can yield strong recommendations.EBP has, however, been criticized and found to have many limitations such as:EBM classifies the strength in three grades for recommendationsBut how do we decide what is high, medium or low quality?The impact on recommendations of different types study designs will be discussed.