© 2004 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd., Royal College of Psychiatrists, & British Psychological Society
EBMH Notebook
Evidence-based medicine: ethically obligatory or ethically suspect?
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences, McMaster University, Ontario, Canada; mona.gupta@utoronto.ca
Key Words: ethics • research • journalology
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In the pages of Evidence-Based Mental Health and elsewhere, authors have argued that it is ethically obligatory to practice evidence-based medicine (EBM).1–3 The argument in favour of this position begins with the assumption that EBM is more able than other strategies to provide us with accurate information about the effectiveness of medical interventions. Accurate information is essential to making clinical recommendations that will be effective in optimising our patients’ health. Optimising patients’ health is a basic ethical duty for medical practitioners. Therefore, the most accurate information—delivered by EBM—is required for practitioners to fulfil a primary ethical obligation. Similarly, knowingly using less accurate information is less likely to optimise patients’ health and is therefore inherently unethical.
This ethical argument relies on an epistemological assumption—that EBM provides us with a more reliable way of knowing than pre-EBM medicine. To date, there is no body of evidence, although there are case examples, demonstrating
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This article has been cited by other articles:
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Waddell, C, Godderis, R
(2005). Rethinking evidence-based practice for children's mental health. Evid. Based Ment. Health
8: 60-62
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