Why do they call some forms of psychotherapy evidence-based? Isn’t everything in science and medicine supposed to be informed by evidence?
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Medicine is hard. So what evidence-based medicine means that the practice is back up by evidence.
But why wouldn’t medicine be backed up by evidence and science/studies? Because some of medicine is backed by mechanism of action. We know that this condition is caused by this organism, therefore this antibiotic works for it. That makes sense to me, let’s treat it that way
But by the time the studies have been conducted (which takes years to decades based on conditions (heart failure vs infection), and often need numerous studies in different areas, as well as ethical approval, and there are so many confounding factors (studying heart failure for example can be hard, because you ideally want to control for diet, smoking, exercise, comorbidities)), we have been treating something something in a way for years, because we felt a need to do something
And then the question comes up, is what we were doing clinically significant. So we have studies that show that this med reduces cholesterol, which we know contributes partially vascular disease. But then decades later we discover, that though we are doing this, and are lowering cholesterol, ultimately clinically it didn’t matter, as the amount we lowered it by didn’t significantly increase lifespan (or affect how quickly something healed)
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