TY - JOUR T1 - Understanding of research results, evidence summaries and their applicability—not critical appraisal—are core skills of medical curriculum JF - BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine JO - BMJ EBM SP - 231 LP - 233 DO - 10.1136/bmjebm-2020-111542 VL - 26 IS - 5 AU - Kari A O Tikkinen AU - Gordon H Guyatt Y1 - 2021/10/01 UR - http://ebm.bmj.com/content/26/5/231.abstract N2 - To practice high quality healthcare, clinicians must be able to diagnose correctly, provide preventative and treatment interventions based on the best available evidence, and ensure decisions are consistent with patients’ values and preferences. The educational approaches to teaching evidence-based medicine (EBM) to ensure the clinical decisions reflect both the best evidence and patients’ values are, however, open to question.EBM experts devoted to optimising EBM education often suggest that to practice high-value, evidence-based care requires ensuring that clinicians are able to critically appraise original research studies, as well as systematic reviews. Critical appraisal includes addressing risk of bias, and that involves a careful reading of methods and results.If indeed optimal practice requires such critical appraisal, it naturally follows that in introducing EBM one should educate clinicians so that they can competently make risk of bias assessments of randomised trials and observational studies, and similarly assess the rigour of systematic reviews. Much—perhaps almost all—of the EBM educational community has adopted this position and, therefore, EBM lectures and workshops often have their primary focus on critical appraisal. These sessions usually involve detailed assessment of risk of bias by careful, critical reading of methods and results of research studies.The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine website,1 presents critical appraisal as the systematic evaluation of clinical research papers and aims to answer the following questions: (1) does this study address a clearly focused question? (2) did the study use valid methods to address this question? (3) are the valid results of this study important? and (4) are these valid, important results applicable to my patient or population? If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no’, it is also stated on the website that ‘you can save yourself the trouble of reading the rest of it’. The second criterion represents the risk … ER -