It’s estimated that unneeded or unproven medical procedures cost us billions each year.

Significant procedures are sometimes not nearly as effective as you might think. “In 2002, the New England Journal of Medicine published a landmark study where they found that this very common knee operation worked no better than a sham procedure in which a surgeon merely pretended to operate,” Patashnik says.

So many medical publications appear worldwide every day that it is no longer possible for an individual medical professional to keep up with the latest state of knowledge. In order to offer support and to encourage new medical research, EBM provides a toolbox of different methods. These tools can be divided into three categories:The first category includes methods that serve to create reliable new knowledge: Someone who would like to compare the advantages and disadvantages of different drugs, for example, will find suitable types of studies here.The second category involves methods that help to summarize the existing knowledge on a subject: They serve to find and select the previously published studies that are best able to answer a particular question. There are now networks of researchers that specialize in looking for the latest research findings and summarizing them to provide easily accessible information.The third category covers methods for presenting information to medical professionals and laypeople in a way that helps them to find, understand and make use of it.The main aim is always to find out what kind of care is most suitable for a particular patient – and how to incorporate their individual preferences and circumstances into the treatment decision.

An evidence-based approach also includes informing patients about the pros and cons of medical options so that they can actively be part of the decision.So making a treatment decision in accordance with EBM means basing it on the best available knowledge from clinical research and medical practice. A number of factors play an important role in the decision. As well as the type and severity of the health problem, these include the person's general life situation, personal values and opinions.

This is the purpose of evidence-based medicine (EBM): to provide healthcare professionals, patients and those close to them with up-to-date and scientifically proven information on the various medical options that are available to them. It can help to find out what sorts of advantages or disadvantages a treatment or test has, when people might benefit from it and whether it might also be harmful.EBM uses special methods that it has developed to find the highest quality evidence for the benefits of a specific medical intervention. This evidence can be found in conclusive scientific studies. EBM also plays a part in making sure that the research that is done can help patients to answer the most important questions. This means that studies look into both the benefits of a treatment as well as how it affects quality of life, for example.

“It’s about embracing the inscrutable nature of human interactions,” says Chang. Evidence-based medicine was a massive improvement over intuition-based medicine, he says, but it only covers traditionally quantifiable data, or those things that are easy to measure. But we’re now quantifying information that was considered qualitative a generation ago.