The Development of Cancer Screening Guidelines.

Abstract

Clinicians and the public have always depended on expert advice to guide clinical practice. However, since the 1970s, a growing emphasis on evidence-based medicine has led to clinical practice guidelines being less expert based and increasingly evidence based and judgments about the balance between the two. Because the existence of standards for guidelines development is no guarantee that a guideline will be trustworthy, tools and instruments have been developed to measure the degree to which a guideline has been developed with rigorous adherence to methodology, and has not been influenced by conflicts of interest.