EVIDENCE-BASED HEALTHCARE
The Vanishing Art of Teaching Evidence-Based Medicine
SAEM PULSE | MARCH-APRIL 2026
By Alex S. Finch, MD, and Christopher R. Carpenter, MD, MSc, on behalf of the SAEM Evidence-Based Health Care and Implementation Interest Group
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More than 30 years ago, McMaster University’s Gordon Guyatt introduced the phrase evidencebased medicine (EBM), advancing his mentor David Sackett’s vision of a medical world in which clinical expertise, patient values, and research evidence interact to produce optimal outcomes for individual patients. That vision itself was built on foundational ideas from Thomas Chalmers, Alvan Feinstein, and Archibald Cochrane. As the rubber met the road, however, medical educators and researchers realized how challenging it is to equip busy clinicians with
the skills needed to ask answerable clinical questions, locate relevant evidence, critically appraise that evidence, and apply practice-worthy findings in ways that align with patient values and augment clinical expertise. In response, annual “Teaching EBM” courses emerged at institutions such as McMaster, Duke, and Oxford.
context of critical appraisal and lifelong learning. Within emergency medicine, these courses helped provide the intellectual infrastructure for resources such as the Washington University Journal Club, the Best Evidence in Emergency Medicine course, and The Skeptics Guide to Emergency Medicine podcast and blog.
These courses typically leveraged the Socratic method to empower medical educators to creatively teach concepts like relative risk reduction, number needed to treat, and likelihood ratios to resident trainees and faculty, all within the
Learning From Oxford
While revamping our Mayo Clinic Journal Club format, we discovered that the McMaster and Duke Teaching EBM courses no longer exist. In September 2025, we traveled to Oxford, United Kingdom,