Introducing “Evidence for clinical practice” [Editorial]

Combining alternative medicine and conventional medicine approaches into an integral whole is called integrative medicine [1]. Combining the best research evidence with clinical expertise and patient values into an integral whole is called evidence-based medicine [2]. Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is neither alternative medicine nor conventional medicine (though the expectation for evidence-based medicine is increasingly conventional). Both integrative medicine and evidence-based medicine are closely aligned if not just different views to providing holistic care.

Finding the best research evidence at the moment you need it is a challenge for clinicians, regardless of domain of practice. To address this challenge, DynaMed was created with a mission to provide the most useful information to health care professionals at the point of care. It is a point-of-care database systematically derived from and presenting the best available evidence across medicine, is used globally, and contains more than 200,000 citations after twenty years of systematic literature surveillance. In the last few years, the systematic effort to identify, critically appraise, synthesize and report evidence has been expanded to include guidance, and DynaMed Plus now provides systematically-derived recommendations for more than 1000 broad topics across medicine. Independent evaluations consistently find this to be the most current clinical reference with the highest-quality evidence summarized using explicit, transparent methods.