Evidence based medicine and shared decision making

Will they ever mesh? Take this example:

In order to advise your patient on the magnitude of benefit of the proposed treatment you look for, or calculate the absolute risk reduction (ARR) for the proposed treatment as well as the absolute risk increase (ARI) for bleeding. In order to translate this into language the patient can understand you then, from the absolute risk reduction for DVT and the absolute risk increase for bleeding, calculate the number needed to treat (NNT) and number needed to harm (NNH) respectively.

Unless you want to include a basic statistics course with every patient conversation, fully incorporating the evidence into every patient encounter is not going to happen.

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