From* St. Joseph's Healthcare, the† Department of Surgery, the‡ Surgical Outcomes
Research Centre, the § Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster …

You are an orthopedic surgeon who has recently joined a group of orthopedic surgeons
practising in an academic centre. You have an interest in injuries about the foot and ankle …

Increasingly, surgical research articles are citing confidence intervals (CIs) when reporting
treatment effects. It is important to understand the theory behind CIs so that present and …

Background: Reports of clinical trials often lack adequate descriptions of their design and
analysis. Thus readers cannot properly assess the strength of the findings and are limited in …

During the 1960s and 1970s, the first randomized controlled trials in surgery were
performed. Prior to this, surgical advances were largely made by physiologic …

Objectives Randomized controlled trials and systematic reviews of such trials are the gold
standard for assessing the effectiveness of interventions. There have been concerns about …

This second of two articles about clinical epidemiology reviews the generation and synthesis
of evidence for the effectiveness of surgical procedures. While well‐designed randomized …

reported data derived from a randomized trial, whereas 46% were based on case series. A
decade later (2006), we conducted a similar survey and found that the relative percentage of …

Before implementing a new therapy, we should ascertain the benefits and risks of the
therapy and assure ourselves that the resources consumed during the intervention will not …

The terms Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) and Evidence-Based Surgery (EBS) are
ubiquitous now. With very few exceptions, however, most surgeons who use these terms do …