Bias: Linking evidence with practice

Abstract

All studies are at some risk of bias. The idea of assessing risk of bias is to provide a basis for giving more or less weight to that piece of information: if a study is at higher risk of bias, then we should be less confident about the findings. The same goes for information from clinical experience. When risk of bias is low, we think the information is closer to “the truth”; when bias is high, we think the opposite. Clinical practice involves collecting relevant information from various sources and boiling it down to make a decision. In doing so, you should pay more attention to information that is less likely to be biased.