How To Survive the Medical Misinformation Mess
Most physicians and other healthcare professionals are unaware of the pervasiveness of poor quality clinical evidence that contributes considerably to overuse, underuse, avoidable adverse events, missed opportunities for right care and wasted healthcare resources.
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Clinicians and patients often do not recognize how pervasive this problem is and how profoundly it affects the care they deliver or receive. Twenty to 50 percent of all healthcare services delivered in the United States is inappropriate, wasting resources and/or harming patients.
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For example, in a pre-test administered to a sampling of more than 500 physicians, clinical pharmacists and other healthcare professionals attending evidence-based medicine (EBM) training programs in 2002 and 2003, 70 percent failed a simple 3-question critical appraisal training program test. The three pre-test questions were designed to determine if attendees could recognize the absence of a control group, understand the issue of overestimating benefit when provided with relative risk reduction information without absolute difference information, and determine whether an intention-to-treat analysis was performed.