Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM)

“With spiraling health care costs, more emancipated patients/consumers, increasing attention to medical practice variations, an information overload, and an overall critical scrutiny of the role of experts and professionals in society, the medical professions felt it had to take unprecedented action to maintain its position as exclusive safe-keeper and wielder of medical knowledge. ‘Unexamined reliance on professional judgment,’ it is argued, will no long do. ‘More structured support and accountability for such judgment,’ in the form of evidence-based guidelines, is required to ensure the trust in the medical profession” (Timmermans & Berg, 16; cf. J. Daly, 123-127, esp. 124, re effort of clinical epidemiology [limited to medically trained researchers] to distance itself from public health epidemiology [with prominent role of non-MDs]).