A brief guide to clinical guidelines.

Guidelines in clinical dentistry are regularly growing in number. At their best, these represent succinct evidence-based recommendations that are directly applicable and improve clinical outcome and cost-effectiveness of interventions. At worst these are highly biased (eminence-based) with limited supporting evidence and questionable applicability to dental practice. This paper presents an overview of available clinical guidelines within dentistry and using examples, discusses their evaluation and how practitioners may use these.