Evidence-Based Surgery: A Guide to Understanding and Interpreting the Surgical Literature

Surgeons are frequently inundated with new academic publications relevant to their clinical practice. There is an ever-increasing number of surgical journals and publications available to surgeons from which they can intake these advances in patient care. While most publications go through a rigorous peer-reviewed process, this process does not include the steps of evidence-based surgery; consequently "the truth" maybe different from what we read. As most surgeons do not have health research methodology skills necessary to help them understand how the research was done, what the findings of the research were, and how to interpret the findings they may have difficulty applying what they read to their surgical practice.
This text, will help academic and community surgeons as well as trainees in surgery, learn the skills to appraise and apply the surgical literature to their daily practice. With these skills, they will be better informed on the best available evidence before applying it to patient care. Although a similar purpose textbook exists for medical subspecialties the content is often not applicable to surgical care due to differences in surgical research methodology and a lack of surgical examples within the medical themed books. In the proposed book, each chapter will start with a clinical surgical scenario with uncertain course of action which will make it relevant for the surgical community. The reader will be taught how to search the literature for the best evidence that will answer the surgical problem under discussion. An identified article that seems relevant to the problem will then be appraised and will address the following questions in a simple and easy to follow manner: 1. Is the study Valid? 2. What are the results? 3. Can I apply them to my practice?
Depending on the study design, additional subsidiary questions will be asked and these will also be appraised.Although the primary goal of this text is to teach surgeons how to appraise the surgical literature, an added benefit is to inform surgeons how to produce higher quality surgical research.

Achilles ThomaDepartment of Surgery, Division of Plastic SurgeryDepartment of Health Research Methods, Evidence and Impact (HEI)McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Sheila Sprague, Department of Surgery, Division of Orthopaedic SurgeryDepartment of Health Research Methods, Evidence and Impact (HEI)McMaster UniversityHamilton, Ontario, Canada Sophocles H. VoineskosDepartment of Surgery, Division of Plastic SurgeryMcMaster UniversityHamilton, Ontario, Canada
Charlie H. GoldsmithDepartment of Health Research Methods, Evidence and Impact (HEI)McMaster UniversityHamilton, Ontario, CanadaFaculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser UniversityBurnaby, British Columbia, CanadaDepartment of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy, Faculty of Medicine, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada