This chapter dealt with the issues of what constitutes evidence. Instead of focusing on their views I will focus on my views of evidence.

A common criticism of EBM is that it very strict in what it considers  acceptable evidence and it doesn’t consider clinical experience and pathophysiological rationale as important. Early EBM did focus too much on the RCT and Cochrane systematic reviews but this has changed. The current EBM paradigm focuses on multifactorial “evidence” including the patient’s clinical state and circumstances, clinical experience, and the best available evidence. Sometimes this will be a systematic review but often it will just be patient experience (what worked or didn’t work for them in the past) or pathophysiology. The early EBM paradigm cautioned us that we can be misled by our unsystematic observations and the pathophysiological rationale. For the latter, it’s because our understanding of pathophysiology changes and diseases are complex and multifactorial and interventions we study tend to be unifactorial. Nonetheless, clinical experience is evidence and is very important and no EBMer will say otherwise. Understanding pathophysiology is important and no EBMer will say otherwise. The key is to understand the limitations of any evidence source.

Evidence supports a belief and doesn’t have to be true. In clinical medicine we can never know the truth. We can only try to estimate the truth with a study because we can’t study every person with a given disease. We have to infer a lot. We generalize from a sample in a study to a whole population and back down to an individual patient. The authors of Tarnished Gold have a real problem with this paradigm but it’s what we do in clinical medicine. Bench research works differently. Rats can all be genetically and phenotypically the same. Bacteria can all be clones of each other. Bench scientists can study a whole population of something and declare an effect. We can’t do this in clinical medicine because we are all so heterogeneous and have free will.

EBM no longer worships only the RCT and the Cochrane review. Patient inputs are viewed as very important and slowly becoming equally important. Qualitative studies are gaining importance. Clinical experience will always be prominent in deciding what should be done from what could be done.