Philosophical critique exposes flaws in medical evidence hierarchies

[Cheshire]

Review by Tom Siegfried of a thesis by Christopher Blunt which analyzes evidence-based medicine’s evidence hierarchies.

It’s not even clear that evidence hierarchies are really ways of ranking evidence. They actually rank methodologies — clinical trials supposedly being in some sense a better methodology than observational studies, for instance. But it’s not necessarily true that a “better” method always produces superior evidence. A poorly conducted clinical trial may produce inferior evidence to a high-quality observational study. And sometimes two clinical trials disagree — they can’t both offer the “best” evidence.

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/critique-medical-evidence-hierarchies

 

[Esther12]

Thanks. The trouble is that every form of evidence can be corrupted and needs to be critically assessed - unfortunately, that's a lot of work, and people hate work!