Final answer:
Evidence-based practice integrates clinical expertise with systematic research evidence to inform healthcare decisions, aimed at improving patient outcomes, and mandates testable, falsifiable, and measurable methods to substantiate efficacy.
Step-by-step explanation:
The term evidence-based practice refers to a process that involves integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research. Essentially, evidence-based practice requires that:
- Interventions be tested using experiments to collect measurable and replicable evidence.
- Claims or methods should be open to scrutiny and must be able to be proven wrong if necessary, allowing for the scientific methods of falsifiability and reproducibility.
- Treatments should provide measurable results to substantiate their efficacy over time and across different populations.
- Answers to clinical questions may often be nuanced rather than a simple yes or no.
In essence, the practice should show that it makes a significant impact, such as reducing the proportion of patients who develop a disease after a certain period. When crafting a proposal or argument, you must use evidence effectively—to demonstrate both the existence of a problem and the viability of the proposed solution.
Choosing the right kind of evidence is critical, including facts, definitions, examples, and reasoning to convince others.
In the healthcare industry, evidence-based treatments for conditions like substance use disorders rely heavily on thorough research as outlined in authoritative sources such as publications by Chorpita et al. (2011) and McGovern & Carroll (2003).