Evidence-Based Medicine: Why All The Fuss?

A new publication, Evidence-Based Medicine, will be introduced later this year by the American College of Physicians and the British Medical Journal Publishing Group. Its arrival raises several questions: Do we really need another medical journal? Why now? And what's all this fuss about “evidence-based medicine”?

The use of evidence in medicine is certainly not new. Scientific medicine, by its very nature, implies both theory and practice that flow from objective, verifiable, shared data—the “evidence.” What has changed in clinical medicine in recent decades is the very nature of clinical evidence itself, in three important ways: the standards for gathering it, the tools …