Beyond the evidence

摘要

It would be a wonderful thing if every treatment we used had been tested in trials where the populations matched ours exactly. Sadly, this isn’t the case. In paediatrics, the evidence we have may be in the "wrong" population: including lots of adults or children of the wrong age. Or the outcomes recorded may only be surrogates, rather than clinically important changes. In order to use the best evidence in practice, we need to consider how far we can take the results "beyond the evidence".