Originally posted on Flying Evidence:
As a clinician or user of health services, you notice (sooner or later :)) that there are lots of uncertainties on the effectiveness of different interventions that you use or prescribe daily. I mentioned in a previous blog that this a huge problem in dentistry.
There are a number of initiatives which aim to fill these knowledge gaps by doing systematic reviews – finding all studies for a focused question (see Dominic’s blog on how a focus question is defined), judge how good they are and possibly synthesizing the data in those studies. They are brilliant and give you some guidance on what is known and what is still unknown on a specific topic area area. You can read summaries of some of these systematic reviews on a blog called Evidently Cochrane. However, sometimes it can be very frustrating when you have a very important question but you find…
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