Evidence-Based Medicine and Women: Do the Principles and Practice of EBM Further Women's Health?

[Guest guest]

Hi All,

 

This may interest those who must deal with advocates of EBM as

the only valid form of decision-making in medicine!

 

See: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=513346

 

Wendy Rogers (2004) Evidence-Based Medicine and Women: Do

the Principles and Practice of EBM Further Women's Health?

Bioethics, Vol. 18, (1) February, 50-71. Flinders University,

Australia. Abstract: Clinicians and policy makers the world over are

embracing evidence-based medicine (EBM). The promise of EBM

is to use summaries of research evidence to determine which

healthcare interventions are effective and which are not, so that

patients may benefit from effective interventions and be protected

from useless or harmful ones. EBM provides an ostensibly rational

and objective means of deciding whether or not an intervention

should be provided on the basis of its effectiveness, in theory

leading to fair and effective healthcare for all.

 

In this paper I closely examine these claims from the perspective of

healthcare for women, using relevant examples. I argue that the

current processes of EBM contain a number of biases against

women. These biases occur in the production of the research that

informs EBM, in the methods used to analyse and synthesise the

evidence, and in the application of EBM through the use of

guidelines. Finally, the biomedical model of health that underpins

most of the medical research used by EBM ignores the social and

political context which contributes so much to the ill-health of

women.

 

 

Best regards,

 

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