It's back-to-school time already an...

It's back-to-school time already and fall is just a scarcely any weeks away. That means it's time for a unimpaired crop of viruses and other infections to bring patients to your office with complaints of sore throat. This year, nevertheless you can be armed with a better way of deciding for what reason to manage those patients. forward page 938, you will find a form that you can photocopy and use during patient examinations to help you make efficient diagnostic decisions and treatment choices based forward decision rules drawn from the evidence.

This patient clash form, developed by Mark Ebell, MD M AFP's substitute editor for evidence-based medicine, personates the first in a series of "Point-of-Care Guides" that will propose evidence at the fingertips of family physicians making clinical decisions. view the accompanying article on page 937 which explains the decision authority that Dr. Ebell has incorporated into the clash form.

The series will instant concise summaries of the strongest available evidence regarding the diagnosis of usual or important conditions in primary care. Each article will provide clinical questions with evidence-based answers and a brief case scenario showing by what means the evidence is applied in practice. Whenever possible, clinical decision orders and evidence-based algorithms will be adapted into a clinical tool that physicians can photocopy and incorporate in their practices.

These clinical guides are intended to terminate the distance between good medicine and advantageous practice. In fact, the guides are in such a manner focused on helping physicians bring evidence into practice that Family Practice Management, AFP's sister journal, decided it sole made sense to publish these tools in tandem. The forms will be made available online for the readers of AFP and FPM at www.aafp.org/afp and www.aafp.org/fpm.

Sample topics in upcoming issues include office-based protocols for the diagnosis of pulmonary embolism, of great depth venous thrombosis, and chest pain; risk prediction for patients with gastrointestinal bleeding and pneumonia; prognosis of patients with liver disease, breast cancer, and melanoma; and dosing of warfarin.

In addition to creating clinical guides that family physicians can add to their repertoire of evidence-based tools, Dr Ebell has plans for several other novel AFP features to help family physicians incorporate evidence-based medicine in their practices.

COPYRIGHT 2003 American Academy of Family Physicians

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group