Medical nihilism: The limits of a decontextualised critique of medicine. 2020

Arjun Devanesan
St Bartholomew's Hospital, West Smithfield, London, EC1A 7BE, UK. Electronic address: adevanesan@doctors.org.uk.

In a new and interesting book entitled Medical Nihilism (2018), Jacob Stegenga attempts to convince us that modern medical therapies are less effective than we think. Given the heterogeneity of hypotheses in medicine and the evidence for or against them, I argue that such a decontextualised critique cannot be made unless substantially weakened. Instead, I put forward an alternative, more nuanced and defensible epistemic view of medicine. According to this view, evaluating medical evidence requires analysis of both the methods of research e.g. randomised controlled trial (RCT), and context-specific information. This is because the way a trial (even an RCT) is conducted e.g. the population recruited and how it is intervened on, will vary and will have significant effects on the likelihood of a positive outcome. Moreover, the relationship between the positive outcome of a trial and the actual effectiveness of an intervention (the trial validity) will depend on these context specific factors. I argue for this position against nihilism by showing how each of Stegenga's individual claims about medical trials (trials are biased in favour of positive outcomes etc) can be questioned by taking the context into consideration.

UI MeSH Term Description Entries
D016032 Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic Works about clinical trials that involve at least one test treatment and one control treatment, concurrent enrollment and follow-up of the test- and control-treated groups, and in which the treatments to be administered are selected by a random process, such as the use of a random-numbers table. Clinical Trials, Randomized,Controlled Clinical Trials, Randomized,Trials, Randomized Clinical
D019317 Evidence-Based Medicine An approach of practicing medicine with the goal to improve and evaluate patient care. It requires the judicious integration of best research evidence with the patient's values to make decisions about medical care. This method is to help physicians make proper diagnosis, devise best testing plan, choose best treatment and methods of disease prevention, as well as develop guidelines for large groups of patients with the same disease. (from JAMA 296 (9), 2006) Medicine, Evidence-Based,Evidence Based Medicine,Medicine, Evidence Based

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