Oh damn, it's the PubMed Junkies vs. the Blog Squad.
This is why I drink.
Except, the Blog Squad ARE PubMed Junkies.
while some bloggers are pubmed junkies, what my colleagues and i disparagingly refer to as the pubmed junkie is a little different than simply a blogger!
a "pubmed junkie" is someone who thinks he has science all figured out because he knows how to search for studies on pubmed. in the eyes of the pubmed junkie, anything that has a pubmed id is unquestionably true, and anything that does not is quackery. this type of clown has a basic (at best) understanding of study design and interpretation and no formal education in research methods.
further, and more importantly, the pubmed junkie is completely oblivious to the most important considerations of interpreting research - the ways that politics dictates what research ideas are fundable, how corporate interests prevent some of the best ideas from being explored, "grantsmanship" and the conservative manner in which research careers are advanced, and how even the medical journals have to be careful not to step on their sponsors toes with challenging research.
pubmed junkies tend to be young - i was definitely one - and believe that medicine is guided by altruism and scientific integrity, not profit. it's a shame that medical research has been so bastardized, especially rct's and large, population based studies. in this epidemiologist's eyes, it seems the purest practical research we have available is bench science from which we have to extrapolate. the politics behind funding rct's and population based studies are just too strong, imo.
Oh yes, we are all naive and young. You've certainly got it all figured out and must be much wiser and smarter. However, it is a shame you can't use that superior intelligence to find the "shift" key. Or is a disregard for proper grammar a sign of true brilliance?
Maybe once I finish my ph.d this year I'll glean some more of your "common sense" and lose my affinity for Pubmed / Medline...
Your blantant egoism aside, it is a fallacy to suggest that evidence based medicine (EBM) forces health professionals to behave like automatons. Indeed, in the classic article
Evidence based medicine: what it is and what it isn't, published in the
BMJ,
David Sackett and colleagues made it clear that EBM involves the "compassionate use of individual patients' predicaments, rights, and preferences in making clinical decisions about their care." If you get sick, don't you want a doctor to apply the very best evidence on what will work for you as an individual? The alternative to EBM is a return to the bad old days when doctors used certain treatments because they seemed to make intuitive sense, or because experts told them to, or because observational studies suggested benefits, or because they had seen a case in which the treatment worked. But, as I have previously argued in an essay called
Subjectivity can be inhumane, published in
wjm, history is littered with treatments that seemed to make sense at the time, but that have now been proven to be useless or, worse still, damaging.
EBM is important and shouldn't be disregarded. I suggest you and any other doubters of immunization return to the evidence.
