BECOMING A MEDICAL INFORMATION MASTER - FEELING GOOD ABOUT NOT KNOWING EVERYTHING

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