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Origin, course and reflections on evidence-based medicine

Abstract:

The problem of current medicine is to consider that there are more evidences than those existing but to a greater measure they are lacking. According to studies conducted, yearly 25 000 biomedical journals and two millions of articles are published; only in the United States there are 20 journals of internal medicine in which 6 000 articles are published. Therefore, it will be necessary to read 17 daily articles during the 365 days of the year to reach the conclusion that the 95% of them can't be considered as relevant scientific evidence. Another research performed demonstrated that only the 16,9% of papers published in the New England Journal of Medicine fulfill the evidence based medical criteria. This percentage goes to 12,2% in the case of JAMA, to 13,4% in Annals of Internal Medicine, to 8,5% in British Medical Journal, and to 7,3% in The Lancet.