Announcing a new series on EBM

Jump to: [Episode 1] [Episode 2] [Episode 3] [Episode 4] [Episode 5] [Episode 6] [Bonus]

Evidence sets conventional clinical practice apart from “alternative” medicine. Evidence demonstrates effective and safe practices to a measured level. Alternative medicine is not demonstrably safe and effective because if it were, they would cease being alternative and become conventional. Adoption may be slow, as it is with all new practices, but evidence prevails eventually.

However, nobody claims that evidence based medicine is perfect. There are many limitations and it is important to understand them if we are to try to improve them. Our next few posts will be dedicated to the limitations of evidence based medicine and what we do to alleviate them, partially or completely.

We will cover:

• What evidence is outside the scope of evidence based medicine
• Outdated evidence
• Irrelevant evidence
• Lack of causality
• Hidden (or not) biases
• Costs of evidence based medicine

If you have any other suggestions you would like us to cover please leave them in the comments.

Meanwhile consider these (tongue in cheek) seven alternatives for evidence based medicine.