An Introduction to Evidence-Based Veterinary Medicine

Evidence-Based Medicine and Stem Cell Therapy: How Do We Know Such Technologies are Safe and Efficacious?

“…5 In North America, a 4-or 5-level hierarchy for ranking the quality of evidence is commonly used. 3,4 A recent adaptation of this system has been used in veterinary medicine, reviewing the efficacy of therapies for canine osteoarthritis. 6 This approach uses a ranking system produced by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), based on work by the American Dietetic Association.…”

“…2 The practice of EBM allows the integration of an individual's clinical expertise with the best available evidence from systematic research, specifically incorporating the best information from clinical research and the best clinical judgment of the clinician. 3 The key to EBM is the requirement for clinicians to be familiar with the types of evidence that are available to them and, in particular, to be able to determine the strengths and weaknesses inherent in the differing types of evidence. 3 A system of ranking sources of evidence into a hierarchy based on their relative strengths has developed, which has frequently led to the establishment of evidence pyramids to illustrate the hierarchical nature of different forms of evidence.…”

“…3 The key to EBM is the requirement for clinicians to be familiar with the types of evidence that are available to them and, in particular, to be able to determine the strengths and weaknesses inherent in the differing types of evidence. 3 A system of ranking sources of evidence into a hierarchy based on their relative strengths has developed, which has frequently led to the establishment of evidence pyramids to illustrate the hierarchical nature of different forms of evidence. 4 Several methodologies have been proposed for distinguishing studies that provide differing levels of evidence.…”

Non-Clinical Benefits of Evidence-Based Veterinary Medicine

“…While many authors (Holmes and Ramey, 2007;Ramey, 2008;Gibbons, 2009;Faulkner, 2014) describe the application of EBVM in practice and mention the potential commercial benefits to be derived, they do not present any data or key performance indicators that show how the advent of EBVM has improved practice performance via commercial benefits. The aforementioned authors merely present ideas based on improvements to client engagement and possible improvements to business due to better clinical outcomes.…”

The staircase of evidence – a new metaphor displaying the core principles of Evidence-based Veterinary Medicine

“…The hierarchy of evidence is a categorisation of sources with the aim to highlight those that are most likely to avoid a biased outcomes (Cockcroft et al, 2003). Level 1 evidence is obtained from systematic reviews and metaanalyses of randomized controlled clinical trials (RCT) or single RCT with narrow confidence intervals (Gugiu et al, 2010;Holmes et al, 2007). Ideally, evidence should be derived from multiple studies investigating the same research question (Sargeant et al, 2014a).…”