The Cochrane Centre in Oxford was officially opened in November 1992, and is perhaps the most visible part so far of the recently launched NHS Research and Development Programme. Its task is to facilitate and extend the creation of systematic reviews of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) evaluating health care. It is named after Archie Cochrane , the epidemiologist who first emphasised that reliable information from RCTs, together with other essential information, is vital for making sound decisions in health care and research. Most clinicians and clinical scientists who have tried to review the evidence for a particular procedure or treatment have felt frustrated by the difficulties of finding out what RCTs have been done, and of interpreting their results critically.
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Andrew Herxheimer (1994) studied this question.
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