Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM)

“EBM itself may pose as great a challenge to the survival of the art of medicine as does the pharmaceutical industry. . . . [Critics of EBM suggest that] the data gleaned from population studies and clinical trials are portrayed as a form of Galenic scholasticism, in which the skills associated with close readings of texts are characterized as of greater clinical value than the actual patient/physician encounter. . . . The patient increasingly has been replaced by the statistic. To the extent that patient narratives have become suspect, the insights that such cases may offer have become devalued as merely anecdotal. . . . EBM provided a mechanism to ensure that academic medicine would finally trump what it viewed as the unscientific nature of medical practice” (Kushner II, 65-67).