Evidence-based practice: lost in translation?

How certain am I about my patient’s diagnosis? What can I tell this patient about the likely prognosis? Will the treatment I have selected do more good than harm? These questions are the foundation of routine clinical practice. As primary care clinicians, physiotherapists have ethical and professional responsibilities to provide the best possible care for every patient. To do this, we need to be able to make an accurate diagnosis, know about the prognosis of conditions we commonly see, and select an effective and safe therapy that addresses the patient’s goals of treatment. In an earlier era of physiotherapy, these processes were based predominantly on knowledge from clinical practice and experience. Then the evidence-based health care paradigm emerged in the 1990s. This, together with a rapid escalation of clinical research in physiotherapy, has resulted in the imperative for clinical decision-making to be underpinned by evidence. Without doubt there are limitations to evidence-based practice. Although imperfect, the evidence-based approach is considered the best