Jonathan Edwards
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
But in countries like the UK, where evidence-based medicine has been practiced for many decades now, so medics can only do what NICE and the NHS stipulate they are allow to do, perhaps this not the right culture and environment to stimulate creative experimental thought?
I think this is a misconception of evidence based medicine. The idea of evidence based medicine was to stimulate doctors to get evidence to support their creative ideas. The restrictions from NICE have not always been justified but the aim of the policy was to reduce the amount of hack usage of old treatments that had never been shown to work and new fads set up without proper testing - nothing to do with inhibiting new ideas.
Doctors are always faced with two different sorts of situation - typical ones where guidelines are useful and atypical ones, as for rare diseases like dermatomyositis, where you have to make a judgment about what is likely to help, without formal trials.
The situation at the moment is that medical and scientific personnel are raring to try new things but blocked by an administration that cannot think outside the box. I agree that there is culture problem, but an administrative culture problem, nothing to do with evidence-based medicine.