Tarnished Gold Chapter 3: Prove It






Tarnished Gold Chapter 2: Populations are not people

Populations are not people






Tarnished Gold Chapter 1: Evidence-based Medicine

















Tarnished Gold book cover image


Look for my 1st installment tomorrow.

What is EBM?






  1. asking an answerable clinical question
  2. finding the best available evidence
  3. critically appraising the evidence
  4. applying the evidence to individual patients


Will EBM be found guilty or not guilty?






Evidence Based Medicine Is Not In Crisis! Part 4









Evidence Based Medicine Is Not In Crisis! Part 3







evidence based medicine is not in crisis! part 2

Greenhalgh and colleagues report that the “second aspect of evidence based medicine’s crisis… is the sheer volume of evidence available”. EBM is not the purveyor of what is studied and published. EBM is a set of skills to effectively locate, evaluate, and apply the best available evidence. For much of what we do there is actually a paucity of research data answering clinically relevant questions (despite there being alot of studies- which gets back to her first complaint about distortion of the evidence brand. See part 1 of this series). I teach my students and housestaff to follow the Haynes’ 6S hierarchy when trying to answer clinical questions. As much of the hierarchy is preappraised literature someone else has had to deal with the “sheer volume of evidence”. Many clinical questions can be answered at the top of the pyramid.

I concur with Greenhalgh that guidelines are out of control. I have written on this previously. We don’t need multiple guidelines on the same topic, often with conflicting recommendations. I believe that we would be better off with central control of guideline development under the auspices of an agency like AHRQ or the Institute of Medicine. It would be much easier to produce trustworthy guidelines and guidelines on topics for which we truly need guidance. (Really American Academy of Otolaryngology….do we need a guideline on ear wax removal?) It can be done.  AHCPR previously made great guidelines on important topics. Unfortunately we will probably never go back to the good ole days. Guidelines are big business now, with specialty societies staking out their territory and government and companies bastardizing them into myriad performance measures.



Evidence Based Medicine Is Not In Crisis! Part 1

Trisha Greenhalgh and colleagues wrote an opinion piece in BMJ recently lamenting (or perhaps exalting) that the EBM movement is in crisis for a variety of reasons. I don’t agree with some of the paper and I will outline in a series of posts why I disagree.

When most people complain about EBM or discuss its shortcomings they usually are not basing their arguments on the current definition of EBM.  They use the original definition of EBM in which EBM was defined as the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. This definition evolved to “the integration of best research evidence with clinical expertise and patient values. Our model acknowledges that patients’ preferences rather than clinicians’ preferences should be considered first whenever it is possible to do so“.

The circles in this diagram are ordered based on importance- with patient preferences and actions being most important and research evidence being the least important when practicing EBM. You can see that clinical expertise is used to tie it all together and decide on what should be done, not what could be done.

Back to the Greenhalgh paper. Her first argument  is that there has been distortion of the evidence brand. I agree. It seems everyone wants to add the “evidence based” moniker to their product. But she argues beyond just a labeling problem. She argues that the drug and medical device industry is determining our knowledge because they fund so many studies. Is this the fault of EBM? Or should funding agencies like the NIH and regulatory agencies like the FDA be to blame? I think the latter. Industry will always be the main funder of studying their product and they should be. They should bear the cost of getting product to market. That is their focus. To suggest they shouldn’t want to make profit is just ridiculous.

The problem arises in what the FDA (and equivalent agencies in other countries) allows pharma to do. Greenhalgh points out the gamesmanship that pharma plays when studying their drug to get the outcomes they desire. I totally agree with what she points out. Ample research proves her points. But it’s not EBM’s fault. The FDA should demand properly conducted trials with hard clinical outcomes be the standard for drug approval. Companies would do this if they had to to get drug to the market. I also blame journal editors who publish these subpar studies. Why do they? To keep advertising dollars? The FDA should also demand that any study done on a drug be registered and be freely available and published somewhere easily accessible (maybe clinical trials.gov). Those with adequate clinical and EBM skills should be able to detect when pharma is manipulating drug dosages, using surrogate endpoints, or overpowering a trial to detect clinically insignificant results. I look at this as a positive for continuing to train medical students and doctors in these skills.

Research has shown that industry funded studies overestimate the benefits of their drugs by maybe 20-30%. A simple way to deal with this is to take any result from an industry funded study and to reduce it by 20-30%. If the findings remain clinically meaningful then use the drug or device.

I agree with Greenhalgh that current methods to assess study biases are outdated. The Users’ Guides served their purpose but need to be redone to detect the subtle gamesmanship going on in studies. Future and current clinicians need to be trained to detect these subtle biases. Alternatively, why can’t journals  have commentaries about every article similar to what BMJ Evidence Based Medicine and ACP Journal Club do. This could then be used to educate journal users on these issues and put the results of studies into perspective.