Evidence Based Medicine not the Holy Grail??

And don’t miss the lively discussion at the end of the article..

When self-evident truth in medicine is systematically ignored (KevinMD.com article of June 3, 2012)

Some things in medicine are obvious.  Despite the endless worship of ‘evidence-based’ medicine, and the constant barrage of studies on every conceivable topic, we do certain things because we know they just seem right.  I take as evidence the fact that we daily try to save lives, devoting research time, untold gazillions of  dollars and heroic clinical effort to our continued goal of staving off death.  Why is this?  Do we know that death is inherently worse than life?  Well, since we can’t see beyond the grave, and can’t exactly engage in double-blind, placebo controlled studies about the after-life, the answer is “no.” But we assume that life is preferable to death, based on our feelings, our sense of the thing.

 

The same is true in our personal lives.  No one can show me a scientific study that details why he or she married a particular person.  No one can offer up a mole of affection for empiric analysis.  And yet, we don’t doubt the existence of romance, or the reality of love.

And yet, medicine is filled with situations in which “self-evident truth” is systematically ignored, and those who believe in it intentionally and often viciously marginalized.

For example, after years of being told that physicians weren’t giving enough treatment for pain, and after years of clinicians saying, “yes we are, and too many people are addicted and abusing the system,” the data from CDC says that far too many are dying from prescription narcotics, far too many infants being born addicted, and far too many people, young and old, are using analgesics and other drugs not prescribed for them.  To which many of us say, “duh!”

And then there’s the customer service model, the thing which causes clinicians to lose their jobs as satisfaction scores fall due to disgruntled patients (often upset over not receiving the drug they desired … see above paragraph).  This is a darling of administrators.  And it clearly has flaws…

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• This is not what the doctor ordered (thehindu.com)
• “How do you feel about Evidence-Based Medicine?” (sciencebasedmedicine.org)
• Scientific evidence (sixpointnineme.wordpress.com)
• Evidence based medicine (slideshare.net)
• Faux Evidence-Based Behavioral Medicine at Its Worst (Part I) (psychologytoday.com)
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