What Constitutes Evidence-Based Pharmacotherapy for Bipolar Disorder? Part 1: First-Line Treatments

Because this piece does not have an abstract, we have provided for your benefit the first 3 sentences of the full text.

Ever since the term evidence-based medicine (EBM) entered the medical lexicon in 1992,¹ there has been much furor among clinicians both in and out of academic circles about what practices do and do not fall within its domain. Randomized controlled trials still provide the greatest level of rigor for determining whether or not an intervention is efficacious. This is largely because the process of randomization, if successful, accounts for confounding biases that might otherwise influence treatment decisions, such as an unwitting tendency to favor (or avoid) certain treatments in patients with particular characteristics.’ ‹