Comments on: Evidence-Based Medicine

By: Linda

Linda — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:39:40 +0000

Evidence-based medicine is medicine based on statistical averages, as in it works for 54 percent of people so use it on everyone.

If it were applied to women’s fashion, all women would be wearing a size 12 dress.

By: Tommy H.

Tommy H. — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 19:40:19 +0000

Greg, I think you, and perhaps Twila, have missed the most important problem. Evaluating the evidence takes time. By the time the evaluation is done to everyone’s satisfaction, the frontiers of medicine have moved way beyond the procedure in question.

So the cutting edge treatments will never be evidence based in the sense you mean it here. And if we insist that third parties only pay for treatments that have been fully evaluated, people will be systematically denied access to cutting edge medicine unless they pay for it out of their own pockets.

By: Bret

Bret — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:33:24 +0000

Imagine what would happen if we had eveidenced based economics? Economists would have been prevented from teaching Keynesean ideas for the last three decades.

Then, when we have a crisis where Keynesean prescriptions might be approprisate, no one would know anything about it.

By: Joe S

Joe S — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:04:10 +0000

Good post, Greg. And a nice complement to the previous post describing the results of the CBO studies.