ArticleJournal of evaluation in clinical practice2017
Has evidence-based medicine ever been modern? A Latour-inspired understanding of a changing EBM.
Article in Journal of evaluation in clinical practice, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Framework for evidence synthesis of traditional, complementary and integrative medicine systems incorporating context and complexity, illustrated by the example of homeopathy.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Navigating uncertainty in low back pain care through an ethic of openness: Learnings from a post-critical analysis.Health (London, England : 1997) · 2025Article
- What makes knowledge translation work in practice? Lessons from a demand-driven and locally led project in Cameroon, Jordan and Nigeria.Health research policy and systems · 2023Article
- Evaluation of Publications from the American Academy of Ophthalmology: A 5-Year Analysis of Ophthalmology Literature.Ophthalmology science · 2023Article
- Quality-of-life measurement in depression trials: A consumerist relic.Health (London, England : 1997) · 2023Article
- Translating COVID-19: From Contagion to Containment.The Journal of medical humanities · 2022Article
- How care holds humanity: the myth of Cura and theories of care.Medical humanities · 2022Article
- Article
- Rights to social determinants of flourishing? A paradigm for disability and public health research and policy.BMC public health · 2019Article
- Shared learning from national to international contexts: a research and innovation collaboration to enhance education for patient safety.Journal of research in nursing : JRN · 2019Article
- Rethinking bias and truth in evidence-based health care.Journal of evaluation in clinical practice · 2018Article
- What can organisational theory offer knowledge translation in healthcare? A thematic and lexical analysis.BMC health services research · 2018Article
- How Knowledge Is Constructed and Exchanged in Virtual Communities of Physicians: Qualitative Study of Mindlines Online.Journal of medical Internet research · 2018Article
- Improving health promotion through central rating of interventions: the need for Responsive Guidance.Health research policy and systems · 2017Article
- Has evidence-based medicine ever been modern? A Latour-inspired understanding of a changing EBM.Journal of evaluation in clinical practice · 2017Article
- Learning Conversations with Trainees: An Undervalued but Useful EBM Learning Opportunity for Clinical Supervisors.Teaching and learning in medicineArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Evidence-based health care (EBHC), previously evidence-based medicine (EBM), is considered by many to have modernized health care and brought it from an authority-based past to a more rationalist, scientific grounding. But recent concerns and criticisms pose serious challenges and urge us to look at the fundamentals of a changing EBHC. In this paper, we present French philosopher Bruno Latour's vision on modernity as a framework to discuss current changes in the discourse on EBHC/EBM. Drawing on Latour's work, we argue that the early EBM movement had a strong modernist agenda with an aim to "purify" clinical reality into a dichotomy of objective "evidence" from nature and subjective "preferences" from human society and culture. However, we argue that this shift has proved impossible to achieve in reality. Several recent developments appear to point to a demise of purified evidence in the EBHC discourse and a growing recognition-albeit implicit and undertheorized-that evidence in clinical decision making is relentlessly situated and contextual. The unique, individual patient, not abstracted truths from distant research studies, must be the starting point for clinical practice. It follows that the EBHC community needs to reconsider the assumption that science should be abstracted from culture and acknowledge that knowledge from human culture and nature both need translation and interpretation. The implications for clinical reasoning are far reaching. We offer some preliminary principles for conceptualizing EBHC as a "situated practice" rather than as a sequence of research-driven abstract decisions.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.