Evidence-based practice versus experience-based practice in orthopedics

Background: Evidence based medicine helps in improving medical decision and service conveyance to patients. Experience based medicine depends on the unequivocal and verifiable learning regulated by the past clinical encounters other than the other social, lawful, and moral systems of the practice. The aim of our study is to find out the evidence-based practice amongst the orthopaedic fraternity and to compare the magnitude of evidence-based practice in different groups allotted based on the experience in the field. Materials and Method: It is a Prospective study done amongst Orthopaedic surgeon in two cities in Tamilnadu Madurai and Chennai. The study populations were Orthopaedics practicing doctors with minimum of 3-year experience. The Orthopaedic Surgeons were given a questionnaire and were asked to fill it. The questionnaire was self-explanatory and they have to tick the best response, which they think was the most appropriate. Questionnaire was prepared based on the AAOS guidelines of clinical orthopaedic practice. The AAOS strong recommendation guidelines were considered as gold standard and the response from the Orthopaedicians were collected and corrected. The main emphasis was given to the second component only. Out of the 120 doctors 14 of them had either one or more wrong answer and only 106 orthopaedicians had given correct answer and their answers only were evaluated. Results: The total percentage of evidence-based practice in our study was 43.4% and experience-based practice was 56.6%. Conclusion: Experienced based practice is comparably more amongst the practicing orthopaedic surgeons. Upcoming Orthopaedic surgeons rely more on evidence to treat their patients than their experience.