TIME.com looks at its limits:
Medicine, after all, is a personalized service, one built around the uniqueness of each patient and the skilled physician’s ability to design care accordingly. “I’m worried about training a generation of physicians who don’t have the other skills they need for the optimal practice of medicine,” says Dr. Mark Tonelli, a pulmonary-care specialist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “They can read the scientific literature, understand the statistics, but they don’t understand how that should influence their treatment of the individual in front of them.” What’s more, some insurance companies have been very aggressive in using evidence-based arguments to deny payment for untested treatments–a circular problem, because how do you create the evidence the insurers demand unless you test the untested?
And yes, the article invokes the Daniel Merenstein malpractice case, which dealt a severe blow to the practice of EBM.
