Reviewer: Cathy J Lazarus, MD (Tulane University School of Medicine)
Description: This is an important contribution to the field of evidence-based medicine. It is a well written, easy to understand, follow, and use, small handbook that I plan to keep in my pocket whenever reading the medical literature from now on. It is specifically designed to assist nonstatistician readers work through the maze of analysis reported in clinical medicine. It is well organized and flows from basic concepts to specific areas.
Purpose: Although the author's stated purpose is to help trainees through evidence-based medicine examinations, the book will continue to be useful (and used) as a reference beyond this period. The book is specifically organized to assist the clinically oriented reader and because it is so easy to use, definitely fills a void. I believe the author exceeded his own objectives.
Audience: This book will be useful to students, residents, academic staff, and community-based practitioners, regardless of specialty discipline. The author, a specialist registrar in general psychiatry, is British, and may not be well known to American audiences. He has done an outstanding job in organizing, laying out, and making relevant an area that is critically important, complex to understand, and recurrently confusing to the nonstatistically inclined.
Features: The book is intended to be a guide to critical appraisal, not a statistics textbook and that is what makes it so useful. It moves from general concepts to specific study types to other kinds of studies and evaluation processes (such as qualitative, systematic reviews, economic evaluations). The content is succinct, easy to understand, framed to be clinically relevant, with well-done illustrations that explain concepts throughout. It has a very useful glossary at the end. It does not overwhelm the reader, unlike other evidence-based medicine textbooks I have tried to use in the past.
Assessment: I plan to keep this book next to my journals at all times, and to use it as a reference daily. It should make reading the medical literature fun and understandable. If used by students and residents just starting out, it should help them understand and master the skill of critical appraisal at the start. It will be most useful as a handbook that is applied to a specific piece of medical literature in real time. The classic books of evidence-based medicine, such as Sackett et al.'s Evidence-Based Medicine: How to Practice and Teach EBM, 2nd edition (W.B. Saunders, 2000), are not nearly as user friendly as this book. I recommend this book to every physician and physician in training.
