Essential evidence-based medicine is of interest to both basic and advanced students of evidence-based medicine (EBM).

The book has 31 chapters and 6 appendices and comes with a CD-ROM. Each chapter starts with several learning objectives and a brief paragraph summarising the content of the chapter. The first 10 chapters deal with basic epidemiology. These include searching the medical literature, different types of medical literature, study design, strength of evidence, precision and validity of instruments, types of bias, basic statistics, and principles of hypothesis testing. Chapters 11–17 deal with the critical appraisal and use of articles on therapy. Chapters 18–26 deal with evidence-based diagnosis, including usefulness of diagnostic tests, screening tests, likelihood ratios, receiver operating characteristic curves, Bayes’ …