Critical care clinical trials: getting off the roller coaster.

Optimizing care in the ICU is an important goal. The heightened severity of illness in patients who are critically ill combined with the tremendous costs of critical care make the ICU an ideal target for improvement in outcomes and efficiency. Incorporation of evidence-based medicine into everyday practice is one method to optimize care; however, intensivists have struggled to define optimal practices because clinical trials in the ICU have yielded conflicting results. This article reviews examples where such conflicts have occurred and explores possible causes of these discrepant data as well as strategies to better use critical care clinical trials in the future.