Evidence-based periodontal treatment. II. Predictable regeneration treatment

Clinical experience, technical ability, and intuition are indispensable but are no longer sufficient as the sole clinical skills necessary to provide the best outcomes from periodontal and peri-implant regeneration treatment. This article describes a comprehensive and rigorous methodologic framework to assess the available evidence contained within the literature. This assessment tool is referred to as the evidence-based method. The methodology was used by a series of task forces convened to evaluate three common areas of clinical regenerative treatment. The major goals of these task forces were: (1) to increase the strength of the inference that practitioners can derive from the base of knowledge contained within the literature, (2) to develop algorithms to improve the predictability of regeneration treatment, and (3) to determine methods that can be used to predictably transfer the value of therapy to the patient.