Mark Gabbay, editor. (Pp 314; £19.50). London: Royal Society of Medicine, 1999. 1 85315 415 6

A flood of publications followed the introduction of evidence-based practice to this country in the mid 1990s and many of the books were concerned with explaining the subject in primary care. Perhaps this reflects particular interest in the topic in a discipline that had not previously believed it had an evidence base to justify its patterns of practice. Whatever the reasons for the initial interest, there has been an inevitable backlash. The criticisms of evidence-based practice now range from detailed technical points, through the difficulty of …