The April JADA cover story article by Dr. Anne-Marie Bollen and colleagues, "The Effects of Orthodontic Therapy on Periodontal Health: A Systematic Review of Controlled Evidence" (JADA 2008;139[4]: 413–422), is a good example of where our research is going wrong. The ratio of prologue to content is three to one. In other words, the material is so arcane that it takes three pages to prove that it has substance and relevance.
You can apply the same statistical analysis formulae to a discussion by learned scientists in the Middle Ages, when they were determining how many teeth were in the mouth of a horse. Endless citations and analysis do not substitute for designing a research project and then actually using real patients to do the research.
If this is evidence-based research, then we are all in trouble. The problem is quite simple. This type of research takes a lot of time and trouble, as well as years to accomplish, and patients must be tracked down and examined. And you have to have control groups as well as treated patients, and they have to present similar problems with similar behavioral patterns, or you get more background noise than music.
