Principles for planning the teaching of evidence-based medicine/clinical epidemiology for MPH and medical students

Medical decision-making requires increasing skills in communication, information retrieval, and formulating and answering focused clinical questions. Medical students need increasing exposure to the principles of evidence-based medicine and methodologic training in epidemiology and biostatistics in order to cope with the explosion of medical information and in order to appraise, interpret, and perform clinical research. This review summarizes the principles applied to teaching these subjects to medical students, as well as to students in Master's programs who will pursue careers in public health or clinical research.