If even experts don’t always agree, where does that leave the patient? Patient advocates say that the situation calls for you to be more involved in your care. Mark Ebell, an evidence-based medicine expert and primary care physician, recommends being an active partner with your doctor to make sure that her approach is an evidence-based approach: “Ask your doctor one or more of these questions when he or she proposes a major change in therapy: ‘How strong is the evidence that this intervention or test will help me live a longer or better life? Which outcomes has this treatment been proven to improve?’, and ‘How will you use the information from this test? Will it change what we do?’”

As a part of taking this active role with your doctor, you may want to look for good information on your own. You’ve already taken the first steps in accessing Lab Tests Online’s up-to-date information on lab tests and evidence-based recommendations on the screening tests that experts recommend. For further thoughts on doing evidence-based research into treatments, see Doing Your Own Research, and for Internet sources of evidence-based medicine, see Evidence-Based Resources on the Web.

In some cases, you may not be able to find the information you seek because not every clinical question has been evaluated using evidence-based techniques. And even for many conditions that have, the evidence may not be clear-cut, as is the case with the PSA test. There are even some very common problems, such as sinusitis, for which there is no consensus on treatment. You may have to weigh the pros and cons carefully. But the important thing is to find the best evidence and use it.

When doctors change their recommendations, it can be frustrating. Medical researchers have been investigating the link between cholesterol and heart disease for some half a century, so you might think they would have answered all the questions by now, but fortunately they are still looking for better answers. The fast pace of innovation is bringing new knowledge and better treatments every day that continue to improve our health care, and perhaps that’s worth a little confusion.