On EBM Guidelines for Assessment of Evidence

Abstract

The leaders of the EBM movement act as authorities on how clinicians in general should critically evaluate the evidence from diagnostic and prognostic research. They issue precepts, and actual guidelines, for this evaluation. In these teachings they draw from epidemiology. But a point of major note is that diagnostic and prognostic research for clinical medicine have not been understood by epidemiologists any better than their central, etiologic/etiogenetic/etiognostic research for community medicine. Therefore, the EBM precepts and guidelines on the evaluation of evidence are ill-founded. They need to be taken with large grains of salt.