Evidence-Based Practice Quotes

I believe you need scientific proof that something works before you entrust your health to it.

Early in my career, I was disappointed that psychoanalysis was not becoming more empirical, was not becoming more scientific. It was primarily concerned with individual patients. It wasn't trying to collect data from large groups of people who have been analyzed.

'There's no need for fiction in medicine,' remarks Foster... 'for the facts will always beat anything you fancy.'

A miscalculation is not negligence, nor prudence a crime. I am a scientist. I base my action or inaction upon probability and evidence. There is a reason we call science a discipline! Inferior minds bolt or build pyres to roast the witches in their midst!

For patients to be safe, we need doctors to be able to reflect completely openly and freely about what they have done, to learn from mistakes, to spread best practice around the system, to talk openly with their colleagues.

Good psychology should include all the methodological techniques, without having loyalty to one method, one idea, or one person.

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.

I know that nurses are not only the largest healthcare profession but are responsible for the delivery of most healthcare, and are often in the best place to be able to see the whole pathway of care.

The scientist-community guy may get a $500,000 grant, and if his equipment works or doesn't work, he still gets a gold star for doing the science experiment. For me, there is no merit in anything for doing an experiment; I have to go home with pictures.

Is it fair to be suspicious of an entire profession because of a few bad apples? There are at least two important differences, it seems to me. First, no one doubts that science actually works, whatever mistaken and fraudulent claim may from time to time be offered. But whether there are any miraculous cures from faith-healing, beyond the body's own ability to cure itself, is very much at issue. Secondly, the expose' of fraud and error in science is made almost exclusively by science. But the exposure of fraud and error in faith-healing is almost never done by other faith-healers.

It is vital that our work be grounded in the evidence and thus accepted by the public.

Today the demands are for even higher standards in the quality of care, for greater flexibility and convenience in treatment times, and for more prevention through screening and health checks.

The problem of psychoanalysis is not the body of theory that Freud left behind, but the fact that it never became a medical science. It never tried to test its ideas.

In scientific subjects, the natural remedy for dogmatism has been found in research.

The way we work in public health is, we make the best recommendations and decisions based on the best available data.

Part of me thinks that innovation, real innovation in health care delivery, needs to happen from the bottom to the top.

Those who fall in love with practice without science are like a sailor who enters a ship without a helm or a compass, and who never can be certain whither he is going.

Truth in all its kinds is most difficult to win; and truth in medicine is the most difficult of all.

Part of what any good health-care professional does, including an advanced-practice nurse, is know when it is time to seek help from more experienced professionals. I'm a primary care doctor. It doesn't mean I know everything. When something is beyond my competency or expertise, I seek consultation from my colleagues.

Teaching needs an ecosystem that supports evidence-based practice. It will need better systems to disseminate the results of research more widely, but also a better understanding of research, so that teachers can be critical consumers of evidence.

Much of outcomes research is a systematic attempt to exploit what is known and make it better.

For the general practitioner a well-used library is one of the few correctives of the premature senility which is so apt to take him.

You can't manage science.... There are some things that you have to do based on the facts regardless of your ideology.