What sort of conclusions can we legitimately draw from the experiments that support evidence-based medicine? John Worrall questions some of the received opinion on this topic in this interview with David Edmonds for Philosophy Bites.
This is philosophy bites with me, David.
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
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Modern medicine is based on good evidence, randomised controlled trials and so on.
This gives us a reliable scientific basis on which to judge which treatments work and why.
Right?
Not necessarily.
John Worrell explores our understanding of causal connections in medicine and questions whether randomised control trials are everything they're cracked up to be.
John Worrell, welcome to philosophy Bites.
Thank you very much.
I'm glad to be here.
The topic we're talking about today is evidence based medicine.
What is that?
Well, it's a good question.
There was a particular movement that began at McMaster University in Canada in the 1980s that believed, rightly or wrongly, that a lot of what masqueraded as evidence in medicine was no such thing.
And when you examined it according to the best scientific principles of when you have and don't have evidence for a theory, it didn't stand up.
And it set out to rectify that situation principally via randomised controlled trials.
The implication was that they wanted all trials to be randomly controlled.
What does that mean?