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The hard art of soft science: Evidence‐Based Medicine, Reasoned Medicine or both?
Author(s) -
Jenicek Milos
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
journal of evaluation in clinical practice
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.737
H-Index - 73
eISSN - 1365-2753
pISSN - 1356-1294
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2753.2006.00718.x
Subject(s) - evidence based medicine , scope (computer science) , mainstream , alternative medicine , argument (complex analysis) , relevance (law) , medicine , medline , health care , psychology , conviction , engineering ethics , medical education , computer science , political science , pathology , law , programming language , engineering
In the past 14 years, Evidence‐Based Medicine (EBM) has enjoyed unprecedented developments and gained widespread acceptance among health professionals. However, should we be content with producing, critically appraising and using the best evidence available for our understanding of health problems and decision making about them? Are our convictions about EBM’s relevance, our conviction and intellectual satisfaction with its mastery and adoption enough? Should we continue pushing forward along this promising path, or should we further diversify the content and scope of EBM? Is EBM the only way to view medicine in the near future? This paper presents some options to choose from in terms of direction and content as well as questions to answer given the current EBM crossroads. More intensive and extensive EBM combined with ‘other features’‐based medicines may be the preferred strategy to follow in the future to determine the development, use and evaluation of EBM. Argument‐based medicine or Reasoned Medicine is one of the options that can be integrated into the mainstream of medical reasoning and decision making.