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Jeremy Howick: The philosophy of evidence-based medicine

Wiley-Blackwell, West Sussex, UK, 2011, 229 pp, $58.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9781405196673

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Notes

  1. Ken Goodman’s 2003 book, Ethics and Evidence-Based Medicine [2], does consider some epistemological questions, though its focus is primarily on ethical questions.

  2. He does discuss in some detail several specific papers, including work by John Worrall [3] and by Federica Russo and John Williamson [4].

  3. More correctly, the hierarchy is one of methods, or study designs, rather than of the evidence provided by the studies themselves.

  4. The EBM text referred to is Sackett et al. [8].

References

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  2. Goodman, Kenneth E. 2003. Ethics and evidence-based medicine: Fallibility and responsibility in clinical science. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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  3. Worrall, John. 2002. What evidence in evidence-based medicine? Philosophy of Science 3(Suppl): S316–S330.

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  4. Russo, Federica, and Jon Williamson. 2007. Interpreting causality in the health sciences. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 21: 1157–1170.

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  5. The Evidence-Based Medicine Working Group. 1992. Evidence-based medicine: A new approach to teaching the practice of medicine. Journal of the American Medical Association 268: 2420–2425.

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  6. Guyatt, Gordon, and Drummond Rennie, eds. 2001. Users’ guide to the medical literature. Chicago: AMA Press.

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  7. Sackett, David L., William M. Rosenberg, J.A. Gray, R. Bryan Haynes, and William S. Richardson. 1996. Evidence-based medicine: What it is and what it isn’t. British Medical Journal 312: 71–72.

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  8. Sackett, David L., William S. Richardson, William Rosenberg, and R. Bryan Haynes. 1997. Evidence-based medicine: How to practice and teach EBM. 1st ed. New York: Churchill Livingstone.

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  9. Grossman, Jason, and Fiona J. Mackenzie. 2005. The randomized-controlled trial: Gold standard or merely standard? Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 48(4): 516–534.

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  10. Cartwright, Nancy, and Eileen Munro. 2010. The limitations of randomized controlled trials in predicting effectiveness. Journal of Evaluation of Clinical Practice 16(2): 260–266.

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  11. Worrall, John. 2010. Evidence: Philosophy of science meets medicine. Journal of Evaluation of Clinical Practice 16(2): 356–362.

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  12. LaCaze, Adam. 2011. The role of basic-science in evidence-based medicine. Biology and Philosophy 26(1): 81–98.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Kirstin Borgerson for discussion and feedback on an earlier draft of this review.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, 23529, USA

    Robyn Bluhm

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  1. Robyn Bluhm
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Correspondence to Robyn Bluhm.

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Bluhm, R. Jeremy Howick: The philosophy of evidence-based medicine. Theor Med Bioeth 32, 423–427 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-011-9196-7

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