The purpose of evidence is to try to validate opinions to foster informed agreement. We desperately need evidence to support opinions about diagnostic and treatment criteria. I think that this is the main cause of a growing crisis in over-diagnosis and over-treatment, the controversy surrounding the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders being only one example of many. This issue is addressed in the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Diagnosis’s Appendix, ‘Making the diagnostic process evidence-based’ – ‘The logic of diagnostic criteria’, pages 751 to 754. This appendix has been made freely available by Oxford University Press on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/reader/0199232962?_encoding=UTF8&page=41#reader_0199232962. If anyone would like an Adobe copy of this Appendix, please let me know.
Huw Llewelyn
Aberystwyth University
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