Plenty of Guidelines, but Where's the Evidence?

Clinical guidelines were first developed in the 1980s, but even now over 20 years later, the process for creating guidelines can be idiosyncratic and error-prone, especially in regard to children’s health, leading to sudden shifts that confuse doctors and parents.
A report in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that only about a third of clinical guidelines reviewed current medical evidence. Fewer than half followed any kind of standard format. And yet we know that Evidence-based guidelines are critical to protecting public health from bad medicine. You can read the essay on the New York Times website.