Evidence-based veterinary medicine: searching the evidence in practice
Abstract
Evidence-based veterinary medicine techniques can be of enormous value to the general practitioner. There are some key processes to apply in order to search and find the science behind questions that arise relevant to cases, or to support standard operating procedures, and this article guides the novice through the basics. Entering text into internet databases can require keywords and phrases that can be built by asking a structured clinical question, including patient population, intervention, comparison and outcome. Useful databases available to the public are compared and basic appraisal of the resulting article hits is considered. A documented summary can be written and reviewed by peers before sharing the results with a wider professional community. If the outcomes can be linked to measurable results from the use of this summary, some tangible value can be evaluated from its creation.
With increasing demands on the veterinary profession to provide an answer to customers' questions, it is common for us to think: ‘I wish I knew what the science is to back up what I'm going to advise’. This is so common, it has an acronym: IWIK or, ‘I wish I knew’. At this point, the practitioner has a choice to find an internet search engine or professional social community as a digital source or reach for a book, ask a colleague and go to CPD notes. In reality, this may be a combination of both (Leung, 2013; Cosco, 2015). Before the internet, our clients paid for the knowledge base from our training as well as our experience in practice but today, many have already looked through social media or the web for a diagnosis and advice on solutions before they make an appointment (Van Riel, 2017). This has created a shift in the expectations and requirements in the application of our knowledge. It is more suitable for us as a profession to guide our clients through the mass of information available in the public domain to what is likely to be in the best interest for each case. For this, we need to develop a different skill set: that of searching quickly for the best scientific evidence to then apply our judgement in order to advise on a least-risk intervention for the case.
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