There is significant art to medical practice, but today’s clinician is from day 1 in medical school trained to apply evidence-based medicine in the care of every individual patient.
There are three levels of evidence-based medicine (EBM), and the interested reader can find a nice summary of EBM in Wikipedia. Every level requires the thoughtful analysis of clinical outcomes.
Level 1 evidence requires a well-designed prospective, randomized, masked clinical trial properly powered in size to deliver statistically significant outcomes. The evidence provided by a single well-designed and