Hierarchies of Evidence are a tool employed by many advocates of Evidence-Based Medicine. They are used to appraise evidence from a range of sources, as well as to teach medical students about evidence and evidence appraisal. My PhD thesis concerns the variation in hierarchies defended, and the range of philosophical interpretations of those hierarchies.
I am agitating for philosophers of medicine and philosophically-minded clinicians to lead the charge against the term “effective treatment”. This phrase has become ubiquitous in the medical and philosophical literature. But it is a misguided choice which misleads the public and practitioners alike. In general, I want to promote talk about …
Randall Monroe of xkcd started writing explanations of complex physical phenomena using only the most common 1,000 English words (or the most common ‘ten hundred’, as he’d have to put it). He recently released a straightforward application which allows writers to check which words fall into his list of 1,000. I’ve …
Hierarchies of evidence can be classified as exhaustive or inexhaustive. A hierarchy is exhaustive if and only if it gives some ranking to any given piece of medical evidence – there’s nothing it leaves out. But there’s a dilemma which hierarchy authors face: either way, hierarchies of evidence present a …
Evidence-Based Medicine is an attempt to simplify and streamline a complex reality into a more manageable structure. Reflective EBM proponents know that matters are very complicated. But they understand that practitioners have very limited time (and abilities) to deal with these complexities. They must use heuristics and simplifications. Sometimes this …
In my paper “The Disunity of Evidence-Based Medicine“, I lay out four distinct definitional strategies employed by proponents of Evidence-Based Medicine, each conveniently beginning with P: Platitude, Paradigm, Principles and Process. I made a bad pun about “Ps in a Pod” in a section title, which actually originates with some …
Critics and advocates alike have expended much effort defining Evidence-Based Medicine. However, there has been little consensus about what “Evidence-Based Medicine” is. Some authors see ‘EBM’ as something one believes—a view about medicine. Others interpret EBM as something one does—a particular way of practicing medicine. Still others seem to view …
