Abstract
Harris M, Taylor G and Jackson D. Clinical Evidence Made Easy: The Basics of Evidence-Based Medicine. Oxford, UK: Scion Publishing, 2014. 9781907904202; 212 pp.: £18.50 (pbk)
In recent years, the move towards ‘evidence based practice’ has been profound. However, making sense of clinical evidence can be difficult to understand and interpret, even for experienced researchers. Clinical Evidence Made Easy by Michael Harris, Gordon Taylor and Daniel Jackson is a book aimed at medical staff and other allied health professionals which claims that, ‘assuming no prior knowledge’, it will aid understanding of this daunting topic, thereby helping them to incorporate only robust evidence into their clinical practice. Having limited knowledge before reading this book, I consider myself a reasonable candidate to assess this claim.
The authors suggest that the book can be used in two main ways: (1) read from start to finish for a ‘complete course’ in the understanding of clinical evidence; (2) as a reference book to pick out key chapters or areas of interest. It is divided into two sections: ‘understanding clinical evidence’, which introduces and explains the terminology and methods used in clinical evidence; and ‘clinical evidence at work’, which provides a tool for appraising different study types with the use of real studies as examples.
The first section very aptly explains concepts in a way which is easy to comprehend. It does not overcomplicate matters, and makes good use of examples and illustrations to aid understanding. This makes it a very useful as a point of reference when looking to understand the terminology used in clinical research.
Using example papers, the second section compares example studies against frameworks designed to appraise different study types. Whilst no doubt providing a useful tool for the assessment of research papers, the example papers used were generally methodologically robust. This section may have benefited from comparing-and-contrasting research that was conducted well and conducted poorly. After all, the purpose of analysing literature is to identify which information is reliable and which is not, thereby enabling us to improve our clinical practice by adopting only high quality evidence.
‘Clinical Evidence Made Easy’ goes some way to achieving its goal of improving understanding of clinical evidence, but cannot be used in isolation. I do not consider reading it cover-to-cover to be a particularly efficient use of time, but it certainly provides an excellent reference point when looking to understand terminology or for guidance on assessing a research paper.