Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is the process of systematically reviewing, appraising and using clinical research findings to help the delivery of optimum clinical care to patients. Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, Oxford defines: "Evidence-based medicine is the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients"

Evidence based medicine is the practice of medicine based on individual clinical expertise integrated with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research. The individual clinical expertise of the physician comes from the experience, clinical practice and is the proficiency and the judgment of the practitioner.

For the diagnosis of the disease and effective treatment, it is very important to use the combination of both, the clinical expertise (the personal experience of the practitioner) and the evidences best available and relevant to the particular matter. Without taking into account the recent advancement and the developments in the health-care, it is highly likely that a treatment strategy that is more likely to benefit the patient is not followed and patient is not benefited with the recent health discoveries, which may treat the particular ailment more effectively, or which could reduce the sever adverse effects of the particular drug therapy.

The importance of clinical experience and skills of the physician can not be denied, the real judgment and diagnosis comes with the clinical expertise, without which, current-based evidence is not exploited in the right direction for the benefit of the patient.

There are certain situations, where decision need to be taken before the clinical evidence or the data is generated, and in those circumstances it is the clinician's ability, skills and past knowledge that starts the therapy empirically and as soon as clinical evidence is developed, the treatment strategy is reevaluated for any change.

Clinical evidence can be generated through different advance techniques in biomedical sciences, including the use of nuclear medicine, bio-chemistry and analytical techniques. This may include several series of examination and testing of the physiological functions of the body and the estimation of pathological markers, imaging of the body parts, etc. The clinical evidence also gives the practitioner a level of confidence, for the right direction of the treatment following the best suited diagnosis.

The clinical evidences can be categorized into different types, and may be based on different sets of data, that are generated during clinical research. This could be a result of series of investigations and preclinical and clinical research following a new drug discovery. It includes the clinical trials of a new chemical entity, for which safety and efficacy has been established and so on.

However besides these clinical advantages, it is fact that usually all clinical evidence is not yet made accessible and this limits the use and implementation of this approach. Most of the clinical research and evidence based data are not published on public domain and is therefore restricted to access due to copyrights. Also, it is observed negative trials data are not usually published, especially in case of commercial or sponsored trials; however this is less frequent in academic research. Due to the heavy costs involved in health care and clinical research setups, it is obvious that most of the research and evidences are sponsored and backed-up by commercial patents and usually are not in academic domain.

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