Becoming a medical information master: feeling good about not knowing everything.

Abstract

The body of knowledge in medicine is growing at a phenomenal pace. Clinicians rely on many sources of medical information--journal articles and reviews, textbooks, colleagues, continuing medical education conferences, videotapes and audiotapes, and pharmaceutical representatives--although they probably have had little formal training in assessing the clinical usefulness of the information obtained from each source. Excellent reader guides on how to evaluate clinical trials and review articles have been published, but these techniques are time-consuming and are rarely employed by busy clinicians. In this paper, we present a "user-friendly" method of managing new information in a practical and time-efficient manner. This approach allows clinicians to disregard most of the available medical information and focus on patient-oriented evidence that truly matters.