> Firstly I find it amazing that people would argue against "Evidence Based Medicine" at all. Isn't the alternative "Medicine without a shred of evidence that i

> Firstly I find it amazing that people would argue against "Evidence Based Medicine" at all. Isn't the alternative "Medicine without a shred of evidence that it works"? You're reading too much into the name. Suppose I discover that whenever I eat carrots I get a horrible rash the next day. I track it carefully and find the effect is 100% reproducible. Eat carrots for a week, have a rash for a week; stop eating carrots for a week, it goes away. Eat them again, it comes right back. I cycle several times, the effect persists. That is pretty powerful evidence that the right medicine for my rash is to avoid eating carrots. But this sort of knowledge doesn't count as "evidence" under EBM because it wasn't part of a massive random controlled trial. And it never COULD count as evidence under EBM because nobody can profit by the advice "stop eating carrots" enough for it to be worth doing a massive placebo-controlled random trial - "not eating carrots" can't be patented. So long as FDA-type drug tests are ridiculously expensive, there is bound to be a LOT of perfectly valid medicine that IS evidence-based - there's evidence for it - but doesn't count as "evidence based medicine" according to the EBM enthusiasts.