The Well-Built Clinical Question: a Key to Evidence-Based Decisions.

What do these scenarios have in common? Among other things, they are all opportunities to make explicit and systematic use of the best available evidence when teaching and practicing clinical medicine. In other words, they are moments of opportunity for evidence-based medicine (1, 2). Many readers of ACP Journal Club are already recognizing and capitalizing on these moments in their daily work. In so doing, these clinicians are using their searching skills to track down published evidence; they are using their critical appraisal skills to judge the scientific validity and clinical usefulness of that evidence; and they are using their clinical judgment to decide with their patients how best to put the evidence into practice. For these steps to be efficient and effective, they must start by using an additional fundamental skill for evidence-based medicine: asking well-built clinical questions.