Evidence-Based Medicine in Neurology

Abstract

This chapter describes the principals and practice of evidence-based medicine (EBM), its limitations, and future directions for EBM. The goal of EBM is to provide high quality information in “real time” for neurologists to use in practice. Evidence-based medicine provides a set of tools to formulate a clinically important question about a particular patient and to efficiently access and critically evaluate relevant information. Neuroepidemiologic studies provide the groundwork for evidence-based medicine by supplying research about patient risk, prognosis, and harm.