Evidence-based medicine: how to practice and teach EBM (2nd edn).

You have first to learn to make evidence-based medicine (EBM) an essential component of normal clinical practice before you can possibly teach about it. This volume is the vade mecum to EBM and is both easy to read and an invaluable teacher's resource. The book is written by hospital physicians from the perspective of practising internal medicine, but the lessons it teaches are widely applicable to almost every branch of clinical practice. As before, there are chapters about diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, harm, guidelines and teaching methods. All are well illustrated with short clinical scenarios to offer extremely practical guidance about how EBM can work in the real world. Just as the latest version of MEDLINE can be accessed readily over the Internet, this book has a web site for the latest upgrades. The authors have tried to emulate the flexible resources needed for evidence-based practice by offering readers several regularly updated resources. Tucked inside the front cover is a small CD-ROM disc that contains the entire text of the book (as a PDF file) and a series of profession-specific supplements that provide clinical examples in more than a dozen specialities. This includes a section on general practice written by Paul Glasziou of Queensland in Australia. The disc also contains Internet links to a host of sites of relevance to evidence-based health care. This is a cleaned up second edition of a very successful but rather nasty to handle little book. The clinical scenarios used to illustrate the material are changed and modernized, and the whole text has been revised carefully. Overall, it is much easier to read. The pages are larger, and the binding, though still plastic, is no longer difficult to open to read the contents. However, in my copy, the pocket inside the back page containing a set of reminder cards had split so the cards just fell out, and the CD had glue from its envelope spilt over the surface making it temporarily unusable. It is a shame that the publisher dresses this excellent and really useful book in such shoddy clothing.