EVIDENCE-BASED CLINICAL DECISION MAKING IN SPORTS INJURY MANAGEMENT

Abstract

Traditionally, sports medicine practitioners have evaluated and treated injured athletes and other physically active individuals based on their own levels of medical training, clinical experience, and common sense. To this day, many widely accepted sports injury assessment techniques and rehabilitation protocols lack the scientific evidence to support their use. In the new paradigm of evidence-based clinical practice, sports medicine practitioners will evaluate and treat their patients utilizing a skillful combination of their medical background, clinical experience, and information gleaned from systematic, unblased, highly reproducible research studies. With an ever-increasing number of clinical sports medicine studies being published each year, there remains a need to analyze the information available in the literature in order to make evidence-based decisions on the efficacy of new and existing sports injury physical assessment techniques and sports injury rehabilitation protocols. The objectives of this symposium are: (1) to review the statistical methods and importance of determining validity, reliability, and measures of specificity and sensitivity relative to the clinical decision making process in sports medicine; (2) to analyze the existing literature and present pertinent examples of evidence-based clinical decision making relative to the use of sports injury physical assessment techniques; and (3) to analyze the existing literature and present selected examples of evidence-based clinical decision making relative to sports injury rehabilitation and treatment protocols. We will present a model for evaluating and grading the available levels of evidence, ranging from large randomized clinical trials with clear-cut results to single subject case studies.