Family Practice Vol. 19, No. 5, 573
© Oxford University Press 2002
Book review |
Evidence-based medicine toolkit.
Douglas Badenoch, Carl Heneghan. (65 pages, £9.95.) BMJ Publishing Group, 2002. ISBN 0-7279-1601-7.
Retired GP and sometime Clinical Audit Adviser to the Royal College of General Practitioners
Not another book about evidence-based medicine! The market is surely served well enough by now. Well it is and yet it isn’t. Hardly a week passes but yet another volume turns up with the ‘Evidence-based’ mantra on the title page. But I think that there is still room for this little one to squeeze in where many of the others will languish on the shelf. It is a well written and user-friendly summary of the essentials, from the Oxford Centre for Evidence-based Medicine. Unlike the rightly popular book by Sackett et al.,1 this makes no attempt to teach the subject, but simply summarizes the various approaches that others have proposed. Its strength is that it is simply written and clearly presented, with easy summaries heading each chapter.
The text is interspersed regularly with small dustbin symbols, showing that if the question under discussion is not answered satisfactorily, the conclusions offered by the authors should be scrapped. This book allows no space for milking data down to the last drop of evidence. What it provides is a very short and comprehensive aide memoire to the systematic appraisal of the usual range of medical research reports. There is a glossary and a list of relevant websites, and the whole package is slim, small and eminently accessible. This book will slip easily into the handbag or pocket of many clinicians and medical teachers who will find its usable clarity exactly what the doctor ordered.
References
1 Sackett DL, Richardson WS, Rosenberg W, Haynes RB Evidence-based Medicine: How to Practice and Teach EBM, 2nd edn. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone, 2000.
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