What Comes Up with the Evidence Based Medicines
Evidence-based medicine, or evidence-based medicine, is the current way of advancing medical science. It is an approach that scans the bibliography on a subject, in order to see with what level of evidence a statement can be considered accurate. When we say, for example, that such and such a new treatment is x% more effective than the treatment considered until then as the best, we must be able to substantiate such a statement.
It is not enough to say: “I have tried this new treatment, and I can attest that it works”. Such a once-common claim is now completely discredited. The proponents of homeopathy are well placed to know this, since, according to the Academies of Medicine and Pharmacy, their favorite discipline would not be more effective than a placebo, and, as such, should no longer be reimbursed. This is what you should know about the pharmaceutical evidence based medicine.
The Associations
In a somewhat caricatural way, one could define evidence-based medicine by an expression like this: “No opinion: facts, only facts”.
Let us take, among the possible thousands, a concrete example, that of postoperative recovery, which is also called “rehabilitation”. For decades, the way of approaching postoperative care was part of a routine learned during years of training as an anesthesiologist or surgeon, and was never questioned. By putting these practices to the test of evidence-based medicine, it was shown that most of them were not validated; they were only justified by habit. It was thus possible to simplify the postoperative period, which allowed the emergence of outpatient surgery.
Medicine is not an exact science: today’s truth, error tomorrow
Despite advances in evidence-based medicine, medicine is still not, and never will be, an exact science. In a “hard” science, like physics, a law is eternal, and applies to the whole of the Universe, like the law of gravity. On the other hand, a theory is only true as long as another does not contradict it. Thus, the “big bang” theory could soon be replaced by another, in which the Universe would have neither beginning nor end.
Seen like this, the EBM is a bit like the gas factory
Medicine is therefore not a “hard” science, and the truths of one day may well be the errors of the next; it suffices for a clinical trial to say the opposite of what was believed to be true to call everything into question, and to trigger new clinical trials to try to decide. It’s a never-ending process.
