It all seems rather nebulous and provides more reason to be humble about what we can really know. From the article:
It all seems rather nebulous and provides more reason to be humble about what we can really know. From the article:
Randomized controlled trials, which are typically conducted by scientists who don’t practice medicine, and often funded by people who want to sell drugs, are not designed with the patient in mind. For one thing, as Tonelli pointed out, these trials tend to weed out patients with more than one illness, meaning these drugs are being tested on people who bear little resemblance to huge swaths of the patient population. (“What elderly diabetic patient doesn’t have comorbidities?” asked Tonelli.) And as Greenhalgh pointed out in a 2014 paper titled “Evidence-Based Medicine: A Movement in Crisis?” — which set off a fervent round of soul searching in the evidence-based medicine community — the results of randomized controlled trials may be “statistically but not clinically significant.”
It all seems rather nebulous and provides more reason to be humble about what we can really know. From the article: