Refining the clinical question: the first step in evidence-based veterinary medicine.

The ability to translate a clinical problem seen in practice into a focused and well-formed answerable clinical question is one of the hardest steps in practicing evidence-based veterinary medicine (EBVM). Asking answerable clinical questions that relate to your patient is the first evidence-based skill a veterinarian needs to learn, and it forms the cornerstone of the practice of EBVM. Like other clinical skills, the more you practice and work on refining clinical questions, the more precise these questions are and the easier the EBVM process becomes. This article reviews the different aspects of an answerable clinical question, its structure, and how to formulate questions better to get needed answers to clinical problems.