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Interv Pain Med
Interv Pain Med
Interventional Pain Medicine
2772-5944
Elsevier

S2772-5944(22)00126-1
10.1016/j.inpm.2022.100130
100130
Educational Supplement
Separating the wheat from the chaff
Vorobeychik Yakov yvorobeychik@pennstatehealth.psu.edu

Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Penn State College of Medicine, Department of Anesthesiology, HU32500 University Drive, P.O. Box 850, Hershey, PA, 17033-0850, USA
15 8 2022
2022
15 8 2022
1 Suppl 2 1001308 7 2022
© 2022 The Author
2022
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
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pmcThe end of the 20th century marked the beginning of the Information Age, a period noted for a comparative information overload relative to previous eras in history as well as the abundant publication and dissemination of news and data, many times resulting in increased difficulty in separating valid information from biased, misinterpreted data. The medical field, of course, is not immune to bias in and misinterpretation of research results, such as safety and effectiveness studies of new treatments and evaluations of existing therapies. This misinformation can have far-reaching consequences which affect the clinical implementation of medical research and have repercussions on the quality of patient care.

At the Spine Intervention Society, Professor Bogduk developed evidence-based medicine courses designed to equip interventional pain practitioners with the tools and skills to review the available literature and evaluate information with the goal of training providers to be judicious consumers of and responders to information. These courses are intended to teach physicians how to critically appraise studies to prevent indiscriminate acceptance of misinformation. The five articles published in this issue by Professor Bogduk encapsulate the courses’ syllabi.

The culmination of the evidence-based medicine cycle is “synthesis,” which involves the classification and summarization of the results of many studies. In fact, systematic reviews and meta-analyses can be described by this term. Articles published by Fogarty at al., as well as by Clephas and Heesen, will help readers both correctly interpret and subsequently produce high quality systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

To provide easy access to the available body of evidence, minimize biases, and reduce redundancies and duplications of the almost unwieldy number of research studies published every day, every study should be registered with one of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE)-approved registries and follow the proposed guidelines depending on the type of the study. The article published by Chow and Rajput will assist authors in navigating through different registries and guidelines by study type.

Yakov Vorobeychik, MD, PhD.

Guest Editor.

Declaration of interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
