Introduction to Evidence-Based Orthopaedics

Abstract

Practising surgeons may be unable to keep up with current practice – what seems up to date today can be redundant tomorrow. In paediatric orthopaedics, and the setting of a busy clinical practice, it is challenging to find time to retrieve the best available studies, let alone analyse them, or synthesise the resulting information into a form applicable to one’s own practice. We are hardly alone in this regard (eg, Narayanan and Wright [1]), so this book is a collective effort to probe the common questions arising in our speciality – and look critically for answers within the literature. In this work, we are proud to have brought together the thinking of more than fifty leading paediatric orthopaedic surgeons to assemble the evidence underpinning elements of current practice. The approach has been that of the ‘evidence-based medicine’ pragmatist, written by frontline practitioners.