Pseudoevidence Based Medicine

An excellent (per usual) post on Health Care Renewal has some interesting quotes from an article (by Wally Smith) that discusses why all the talk about evidence based medicine is often nothing more than a smokescreen.

I think Wally would agree with the following statement: Physicians often believe that the medicines they prescribe have wonderful evidence of safety and efficacy, yet they frequently fail to consider the many biases in the research process that end up producing "evidence" that often resembles marketing much more than science. Background here and here (among many, many others).

I like the term pseudoevidence based medicine so much that I may have to use it intermittently with such terms as experimercial and evidence b(i)ased medicine.

While I'd like to quote extensively from Wally's piece, I'll send interested readers over to Health Care Renewal to check out the whole thing.