This introductory chapter reviews the book Detecting Deception: Current Challenges and Cognitive Approaches. The goal of evidence-based medicine (EBM) is to produce systematic reviews and clinical guidelines that summarize scientific knowledge about a topic in a single publication that preferably is updated regularly. This book aims to meet the needs of health professionals in anaesthesiology as medicine moves to be evidence-based. It has been a tool to understand the basic and advanced use of evidence-based methodology. The book explores clinical and statistical heterogeneity, how papers can be read and their results interpreted. The book details how to practice EBM in preoperative evaluation, regional and general anaesthesia, fluid therapy and the use of antiemetics; and how to use EBM in the subspecialities in anaesthesia, postoperative pain therapy, critical care and emergency medicine. The book provides an exciting agenda for research and clinical work in the field of evidence-based anaesthesia.

This chapter reviews alternative and adjunctive modes of delivering postoperative analgesia, and summarises what is known about efficacy and outcome. It presents the evidence for the commonly utilised analgesic modalities as they pertain to postoperative outcome in light of our overall goal of rapid return to normal physiologic function after surgery and the increasing movement towards a multimodal approach to analgesia. Randomised trials and meta-analyses overwhelmingly support the superior analgesic efficacy of epidural analgesia compared with "conventional analgesia" and patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) administered opioids. Multiple studies, and meta-analyses, confirm an average 30-50% opioid-sparing effect of NSAIDs. The focus of postoperative pain trials has been on assessing new modes of analgesia with particular regard both to their analgesic efficacy and to their ability to improve surgical outcome. Epidural analgesia offers a number of distinct benefits and appears to hasten recovery.