Is Clinical Research as Helpful to Clinicians as it Could be?

Translating findings from clinical research to hands-on practice is still far from being effective especially with regard to new treatments. The highest level of evidence (i.e. evidence-based clinical practice guidelines, meta-analysis, systematic reviews) provide curated, comprehensive, and consistently organized summations and analyses of evidence across groups of subjects, but potentially lack clinical applicability and utility for individual cases. With the aim of providing treatment using the best available evidence, clinicians are still obliged to discern which research findings are clinically applicable to a particular patient given the broad spectrum of research designs reported in the literature, some of which may fall short of the highest standard of scientific rigor in the analysis of groups represented by randomized controlled trials (RCTs)