STEPPED CARE: AN EVIDENCE-BASED APPROACH TO DRUG THERAPY Pharmacotherapy of Tinea Capitis

Editors' Note: This month we continue the new featureSTEPped Care: An Evidence-BasedApproach to Drug Therapy. These articles are designed to provide concise answers to the drog therapy questions that family physicians encounter in their daily practice. The format of the feature will folhw the mnemonic STEP: safety (an analysis of adverse effects that patients and providers care about), tolerability (pooled dropout rates from large clinical trials), effectiveness (how well the drogs work and in what patient population[sj), and price (costs of drog, but also cost-effectiveness of therapy). 1 Hence, the name STEPped Care. Since the informatics pioneers at McMaster University introduced evidence-based medicine,2 Slawson and colleagues3,4 have brought it to mainstream family medicine education and practice. This feature is designed to further the mission of searchingfor the troth in medical practice. Authors will provide information in a stroctured format that allows the readers to get to the meat of a therapeutic issue in a way that can help physicians (and patients) make informed decisions. The articles will discourage the use of disease-oriented evidence (DOE) to make treatment decisions. Examples of DOEr include blood pressure hwering, decreases in hemoglobin A Ie, and SO on. We will include studies that are POEMs-patient-oriented evidence that matters (myocardial infarctions, pain, strokes, mortality, etc)-with the goal of offering our patients the most practical, appropriate, and scientifically substantiated therapies. Number needed to treat to observe benefit in a single patient will also be included as a way of defining advantages in terms that are relatively easy to understand. ),6 At times this effort will be frustrating. Even as vast as the biomedical literature is, it does not always support what clini-