The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the Crisis of Credibility in Clinical Research DOCX

Title	The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the Crisis of Credibility in Clinical Research
Author	Leemon McHenry
Pages	1
File Size	12.8 KB
File Type	DOCX
Total Downloads	25
Total Views	437

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The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine We live in an age allegedly committed to evidence-based medicine, whereby prescribing physicians are guided by the most reliable evidence in randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials (RCTs). The RCT was accepted as the gold standard of clinical experiment from the earliest pioneering efforts in applying the "experimental philosophy" to medicine. This application provided a system to assess the strength of the evidence of risks and benefits of treatments and diagnostic tests, one that was meant to provide a solid scientific foundation of medicine and expose extravagant claims of efficacy. The validity of this approach depends on reliable data from clinical trials and because the data are largely, if not completely, manipulated by the manufacturer of pharmaceuticals, the approach is invalidated. Evidence- based medicine is an illusion. In this book, Jon Jureidini and Leemon B. McHenry argue that medicine desperately needs to re-evaluate its relationship with the pharmaceutical industry and re-affirm the ideal of evidence-based medicine. Without a basis for independent evaluation of the results of RCTs, there can be no confidence in evidence-based medicine. They see Karl Popper's Critical Rationalism as providing the philosophical framework for understanding how science should function in the marketplace of ideas. Science demands rigorous, critical examination and especially severe testing of hypotheses to function properly, but this is exactly what is lacking in academic medicine. Jon N. Jureidini is Professor of Psychiatry, Critical and Ethical Mental Health Research Group, Robinson Research Institute, University of Adelaide Leemon B. McHenry is Fellow at Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh and retired lecturer in philosophy at California State University, Northridge...