-----Original Message-----
Jel Coward wrote:
>For ages I have thought about, and it has been written about (somewhat)
>how evidence based medicine only suits populations and not individuals.
>The above posting moves my mind one step further (a difficult thing to
>do. so well done Julian :)
>I think it is safe to say that Evidence Based Medicine is dangerous for
>those with rare diseases.
EBM was introduced and is still taught to apply to the care of individual
patients. It is only misuse, as in the example given, that creates problems.
This seems to happen with clinicians or, more often, non-clinicians who have
only read the first part of the definition of EBM and not to the end of the
sentence where individual patients are mentioned. In these cases of misuse,
it is simply being used as a handy smokescreen for lazy rationing decisions.
Andy
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