Evidence-based medicine is a concept that has come to the fore in the past few years. Clinicians are increasingly encouraged to practise patient management based on available evidence in the scientific literature. For example, new pharmacological therapies are only used when large randomized trials have 'proven' that a particular drug is better than existing ones. This is also the case in surgical specialties, although surgery has traditionally seen a lack of use of this information, with individual surgeon's preferences being most influential in treatment choices. However, more recently,...