One of the fundamental skills required for practising EBM is the asking of well-built clinical questions. To benefit patients and clinicians, such questions need to be both directly relevant to patients' problems and phrased in ways that direct your s earch to relevant and precise answers. In practice, well-built clinical questions usually contain four elements, summarised below.
One of the benefits of careful and thoughtful question-forming is that the search for evidence is easier. The well-formed question makes it relatively straightforward to elicit and combine the appropriate terms needed to represent your need for inform ation in the query language of whichever searching service is available to you.
You are referred to the appropriate sections of the book, How to Practice and Teach EBM for more details.