The GATE frame: critical appraisal with pictures

Epidemiologic evidence about the accuracy of diagnostic tests, the power of prognostic markers, and the efficacy and safety of interventions is the cornerstone of evidence-based health care (1). Practitioners of evidence-based health care require critical appraisal skills to judge the validity of this evidence. The members of the Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) Working Group are international leaders in teaching critical appraisal skills, and their users' guides for appraising the validity of the health care literature (2) have long been the basis of teaching programs worldwide. However, we found that many of our students took a reductionist “paint by numbers” approach when ...