Treating chronic migraine headaches: an evidence-based practice approach

Psychologists and other mental health care professionals are generally trained to incorporate empirical evidence into clinical practice, but few have been taught formal techniques for doing so. Given the rapidity of progress in the clinical sciences, there is a growing need among practitioners to access current, clinically relevant research and have strategies for integrating these research findings into the clinic. In the field of medicine, evidence-based medicine took hold in the early 1990s to provide a framework and skill set for translating research into practice. This method is now widely known as evidence-based practice (EBP) to reflect its applicability to multiple disciplines. In this article, we present a general overview of EBP, illustrate how we used this approach to develop a treatment plan for a patient who had chronic migraine headaches, and discuss some of the opportunities and challenges EBP presents to mental health professionals.