Southern medical journal
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Southern medical journal · Mar 2012
ReviewApplication of the principles of evidence-based medicine to patient care.
Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is the conscientious and judicious use of the best evidence available collected from clinical trials, guidelines, and consensus statements. This article provides simple ways to practice EBM using five steps (assess the patient, ask a clearly focused clinical question, acquire the best evidence available from the medical literature, appraise the evidence, and apply the evidence to patient care) and how to execute each step properly, multiple examples of how to apply EBM to patient care, and examples of how to apply the PICO mnemonic (patient, intervention, comparison, and outcome) to the process of EBM.
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Clinical research typically gathers sample data to make an inference about a population. Sample data carries the risk of introducing variation into the data, which can be estimated by the standard error of the mean. Data are described using descriptive statistics such as mean, median, mode, and standard deviation. ⋯ This probability is determined by statistical tests. Of these groups of tests, the Student t test and the analysis of variance are the more common parametric tests, and the chi-square test is common for nonparametric tests. This article provides a basic overview of biostatistics to assist the nonstatistician with interpreting statistical analyses in research articles.