Evidence Based Medicine Called Into Question

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"Evidence Based Medicine" (EBM) has become a hip buzz word phrase when experts, including some CAM proponents, get together to discuss the future of health care. On December 13th, the Citizens' Council on Health Care (CCHC) in Minnesota released a report "How Technocrats are Taking Over the Practice of Medicine: A Wake-up Call to the American People" which, according to CCHC President and the report's author Twila Brase, R.N., "shines a bright light of openness on the terms 'evidence-based medicine' and 'best practices,' including the purposes of proponents and the concerns of critics." According to Brase, "Evidence-based medicine is an attack on the patient-doctor relationship. EBM is not individualized care. It is group-think medicine. . .Control over medical decisions is being shifted from doctors to data crunchers; from professionals at the bedside to bureaucrats in big offices. . .The public should not be fooled by the nifty-sounding names. Evidence-based medicine is managed care masquerading as science."

An executive summary and the report itself can be viewed or downloaded as pdf files, but they are both encrypted and impossible to print, to copy and paste, or to quote from. Nonetheless, they are important reading.

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