Finding the Evidence

Research evidence is one of the corner-stones of evidence-based medicine (EBM), which is defined formally below. Whether you are a practitioner wanting to practice EBM, a patient wanting to find the best treatment, or a researcher wanting to find all the current evidence, you will find invaluable links in this section to help you find reliable evidence on the effects, safety and effectiveness of CAM therapies.

How to find the evidence
If you want evidence about a specific CAM therapy in a specific disease, where can you search?

The links CAM Journals and CAM Databases provide access to specialist resources in the CAM field. The link EBM Sites provides useful summaries of the evidence, and the CASP and ScHARR sites include tutorials on how to search for evidence.

Hand- searching of paper journals at Libraries may yield further evidence from smaller or discontinued journals.

The NHS & DoH links provides access to a number of substantial electronic libraries of clinical evidence.

The Other Useful Links link provides access to a variety of other specialist sites that relate to CAM, including the well developed patient advice site “Medline for the Public”, supported by the US National Institutes for Health.

The substantial reviews produced by the RCCM’s CAMEOL project in 2009 provided evidence on CAM therapies in some common conditions. The evidence on cancer, mental health, multiple sclerosis and stroke are uniquely available on the RCCM web site. The CAMEOL Reports as extensive, each condition having a number of sub-sections to it. Further evidence from the CAMEOL project related to arthritis, asthma, depression and low back pain and is now maintained and updated by the NHS through NHS Evidence.

EBM identifies the strength of the evidence of the risks and benefits of treatments (including lack of treatment) as well as diagnostic tests. This evidence can range from meta-analyses and systematic reviews of double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials at the top end, down to expert opinion. Therefore the practice of evidence based medicine ensures integrating individual clinical expertise (developed through clinical experience and practice) with the best available external evidence from systematic research.

Therefore evidence based medicine is the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients.

Useful descriptions and definitions can be found at :

'What is evidence based- medicine'  - http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/painres/download/whatis/ebm.pdf

'Evidence based medicine: what it is and what it isn't' - http://www.bmj.com/content/312/7023/71.long

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