It’s time for your annual physical and you’re confident. When your doctor told you that you were at high risk of a heart attack, you began watching your diet and exercising regularly. You did everything your doctor recommended to keep your cholesterol under control, and you’re relieved but not surprised when the lab results show that your cholesterol level is lower than it was on your last visit.
So, when your doctor suggests you start taking a cholesterol-lowering statin drug, you’re confused. Familiar alarm bells start ringing in your mind. What happened?
She explains that new clinical studies found that people at high or moderately high risk of a heart attack benefit from more aggressive treatment. The studies led the National Cholesterol Education Program to update its treatment guidelines to recommend that these people should do all they can to lower their levels of LDL (“bad”) cholesterol. If diet and exercise haven’t done it, this means initiating cholesterol-lowering drug therapy for many more patients.
Your physician’s approach to your treatment is known by the buzz words “evidence-based medicine” - applying the best evidence to specific cases to improve patient care. Isn’t that what doctors were supposed to be doing all along? Yes, but the information explosion that has affected so many segments of society is being felt particularly strongly in medicine.
Medical knowledge is accumulating—and changing—with such dizzying speed that the medical community has found it needs new methods to cope with it all. Novel tests, drugs, procedures, and treatments are constantly being introduced. Studies are published daily with fresh data that support or modify long-standing beliefs, and sometimes, that demand substantial changes in treatment and habits. One study found that an internal medicine specialist who read the five best journals in the field would be exposed to only one half of the most relevant articles in that specialty. Even the main literature databases include less than half of the world’s journals.
Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is a formalized system for helping the medical community to cope with this information explosion. It’s about formal protocols that are applied to the latest data to determine what data best support the best outcomes. This filtering and prioritizing process requires an enormous effort to sift through large volumes of information, but the end result helps doctors to identify the best diagnostic tests and treatments.
No comments:
Post a Comment