[Critical reading and EBM : the LIFE trial].

For ten years, " evidence-based medicine " gradually invaded all the medical field : clinical practice but also research and teaching. More than being just a new paradigm, it constitutes one of the pillars of good medical practice beside experimentation, ethics and the requests of the patient. It gathers collective quantitative aspects (statistics, public health, epidemiology, biomedical research) applied to the individual reality of each patient in search of care. One of the methods used in " evidence-based medicine " is critical reading : in-depth analysis of the published trials in medical journals, to extract and validate the elements applicable to the daily clinical practice. The LIFE trial, designed to compare treatment with a sartan or a beta-blocker for hypertensive patients with left ventricular hypertrophy, is used as a model to concretely explicit the various steps and methodologies of critical reading.