If practice guidelines are to be effective and useful in primary care, they should consist of sensible advice that can prevent
unsatisfactory practices, provide better coordination, and serve as blueprints for simple measures to improve the current
state of health care. Practice guidelines should take into account the unique nature of family practice, in which patients
often have multiple problems and present with various vague and nonspecific complaints.
Practice guidelines are still relatively crude summaries of implicit and subtle clinical skills.25,26 They should be used not to dictate practice but to improve clinical judgment. It is clear that the perspective of the family
physician is essential to the development, dissemination, implementation and audit of practice guidelines in the community.
Family physicians should resist any wholesale rush to uncritically adopt practice guidelines. In a sense, guidelines can be
considered a new medical technology or treatment; therefore, physicians should be as skeptical about guidelines as they are
about any other medical innovation, until good evidence confirms that they are of definite benefit.