Thanks Ben , very timely (if not urgent) point. I tried to raise it several times during my masters in Oxford EBHC, but was invariably rebuked by hearing "bioinformatics is a descriptive branch of biology which has nothing to deal with the biostatistics". I now started another round of graduate studies in Bioinformatics and can testify that enormous amount of "unsubstantiated inferences" (from stat reasoning point of view) is happening there ; also Biotech industry backing is enormous (aka new big pharma).
Richard Simon so far is the only statistician who came with the manifesto " Genomic Clinical trials and Predictive medicine" book a year-two ago. This remained largely ignored by the field.
I wonder whether EBM will be up to the task to face this new challenge . I am afraid the time is running against EBM in this case.
Nick
Nickolas Myles, MD, PhD, MSc, FRCPC
Anatomical pathologist, St.Paul's Hospital,
Clinical Associate Professor, University of British Columbia
Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
1081 Burrard St, Vancouver, BC, V6Z1Y6
Phone (604) 682-2344 x 66038
Email: [log in to unmask]
-----Original Message-----
From: Evidence based health (EBH) [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Djulbegovic, Benjamin
Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2015 3:58 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Big data, personalized medicine/precision medicine and EBM...
Dear colleagues,
Surprisingly, this discussion group has infrequently discussed the issues of big data, personalized medicine and precision medicine (-omics) despite overwhelming enthusiasm for this technology both by media and major funders.Big Data are famously introduced by its proponents as "death of theory"- all our inferences will be data driven only. EBM- traditionally extremely preoccupied with the ways we draw our inferences - strangely has remained silent, on the sideline of what appears to be introduction of a major disruptive technology in our life time.
Finally someone has written something about this- Gerd Antes of the German Cochrane Center, a frequent contributor to our discussion group, just wrote a thoughtful piece challenging this big data and -omics "revolution" from a classic methodological point of view. Here is the link to his piece:
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> http://www.labtimes.org/editorial/e_654.lasso
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> I hope Gerd's article stimulates some further discussion that perhaps will lead to more writing toward "EBM response to Big data and -omics"
Thanks
Ben djulbegovic
USF
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