NOTE:
Orac is on vacation recharging his Tarial cells and interacting with ion channel scientists, as a good computer should. In the meantime, he is rerunning oldies but goodies, classics, even. (OK, let s not get carried away.) Here s one from all the way back in 2007. Notice how, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Evidence-based medicine is not perfect.
There, I ve said it. Like anything else humans do in science or any other endeavor, evidence-based medicine (EBM) has its strengths and its weaknesses. On the whole, I consider it to be potentially vastly superior to the way that medicine was practiced in the past, bringing a systematic, scientific rigor to how we practice to replace parts of medicine that tended to be based as much (or more) on tradition or dogma as on evidence. Naturally, a common source of attacks on EBM is advocates of alternative medicine, who often appeal to different ways of knowing or postmodernist attacks on scientific medicine itse