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Brian Baigrie examines how quality (reliability/validity) and relevance (weight/importance) affect the vast literature on EBM’s advantages.

Image courtesy of interviewee. March 22, 2024

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The speaker reflects on the concept of evidence-based medicine (EBM) and its implications during the COVID-19 pandemic. They suggest that EBM traditionally focuses too narrowly on population studies and controlled trials, potentially overlooking other valuable forms of evidence, such as observational studies and patient narratives. This video video narrow focus can lead to a lack of responsiveness to real-world complexities, particularly in light of the pandemic.

The speaker discusses the significance of distinguishing between two criteria for evidence: its methodological "goodness" (validity and reliability) and its relevance (persuasiveness and appropriateness). They note that many decisions made by public health organizations during the pandemic—like the initially dismissive stance on the effectiveness of masks and the delayed recognition of airborne transmission—reflect inadequate consideration of these criteria.

Furthermore, they argue that evidence-based medicine’s hierarchical framework, which privileges certain types of research over others, may have hindered a broader understanding of the pandemic's complexities. The pandemic serves as a wake-up call, revealing the limitations of a rigid adherence to traditional EBM principles. The conversation closes by highlighting the importance of integrating diverse forms of medical knowledge and evidence to enhance public health strategies and improve trust in health authorities.

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I came at this much before the pandemic.

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Looking at EBM

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and what's considered to be a narrow focus on,

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derivations from population studies,

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looking at legal literature in other areas where evidence

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of reasoning is really been, studied

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and theorized, there is standardly a distinction between

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evidence that it, I mean, we can use the word goodness,

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you may not wanna use that.

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That is valid according to standard research methods.

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And the law would be how one gives a deposition of some sort

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or other on one and relevance that is,

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has weight in some sense.

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And both of those criteria need to be met for something

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as admitted as evidence in, in, in most legal jurisdictions.

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So I, I started thinking about EBM from that point of view.

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And, you know, the article mentions, pithy comment by my

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deceased brilliant colleague Ian Hacking,

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who we wrote a lot about statistics

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and probability that very, you know,

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evidence in principle is something

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that reaches beyond itself.

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But in fact, as I pointed out,

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that sometimes it is not persuasive, even evidence

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that sometimes seems to be gleaned using the best re

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or what we think of as the best research methods

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may not be persuasive.

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And I thought, I wrote this at the very beginning

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of the pandemic, and it was a time when there was a great

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deal of debate about routes of transmission for covid

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and, you know, the effectiveness

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of some public health measures like social distancing

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and face masking and the rest of those things.

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And I thought that, well, much

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of the conversation is a muddled

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because these two things are being rolled together.

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What we're looking for here to find our way out

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of the pandemic is evidence that's good according

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to the certain criteria, in particular

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criteria we would associate

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with the evidence-based medicine movement,

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the World Health Organization, like hundreds

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of other organizations bought into EBM, which as you know,

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privileges, population studies, tries

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to generate policy sometimes during the pandemic,

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but tries to generate clinical recommendations

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for individual patients based upon the normal, patient

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or what happened in the study group.

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So I, I wanted to address that in this paper

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and led a different framework for thinking about evidence.

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You know, a BM has been very masterful at putting a books

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of guidelines and all the rest of this stuff and handbooks,

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but there is a theory of evidence that underpins, EBM,

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but it has never been, like spelled out

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as a theoretical position.

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So I wanted to lay down a couple of criteria that any theory

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of evidence should satisfy.

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One related to the goodness, validity, reliability,

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depending on your take on that on one side.

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But on the other side, the relevance,

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persuasiveness appropriateness of evidence as well.

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The EBM over a series of publications has kind

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of refined their view and changed it

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In some ways.

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Many people would say not, there haven't been as responsive

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to concerns about how patient preference values,

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et cetera fits into this kind of framework

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for making clinical recommendations.

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But there were other concerns as well

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because, you know, in, in the most recent iteration

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evidence-based medicine, how to practice

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and teach it, it says quite explicitly the

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best research evidence.

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By best research evidence, we mean valid

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and clinically relevant research.

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So the relevance criterion, which I think needs

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to be sorted out from the, the goodness criterion,

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they're kind of both in there together.

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So, you know, good evidence is evidence that's accrued

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through a very particular research method.

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And which is kind of an odd thing

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because medicine is this place

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with many different research method side

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by side with one another.

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Different sorts of movements about what counts

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as medical knowledge and narrative based medicine,

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precision medicine, person centered medicine.

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And the rest of them, there are many more.

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And you know, EBM kind of hold kind

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of a Trump position here,

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but through the creation of the grade system, right?

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The grade framework, which kind of creates a hierarchy

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for the confidence we can have in different sources

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of medical knowledge,

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putting statistically derived information from population

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studies, RCTs, randomized controlled trials,

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and you know, meta, meta studies.

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Those meta studies by the way, only include RCTs.

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They don't include observational studies or cohort studies

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or many other ways that we could try

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to become better informed about any issue at hand.

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So I don't think there's been much pivoting in

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the evidence-based movement.

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It just seems to be rolling along in much the same way.

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But I do think the, the pandemic

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to some extent was a wake up call

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because most public health agencies, as you know,

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the s general of the United States lost his position in part

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because he was parroting something

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that the World Health Organization was saying.

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You know, we in Canada,

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our so-called top Doctor didn't lose her position,

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but there were many people who thought that she should,

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I'm not saying I'm one of them, but clearly it was just

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following and World Health organization's footsteps on a

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number of issues that were pivotable pivotal

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to thinking about the best strategies to manage a pandemic

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that has been a promise

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that evidence-based medicine proponents

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of evidence-based medicine, made very early.

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I don't suggest in this paper we're talking,

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that's the background for our conversation today,

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but in other places, the grade system evaluation gives

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approval for clinicians to kind of step outside of

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directly asking a patient about their various preferences,

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information about the patient based on normal patient,

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that something called a normal patient

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that emerges in the context of trials of one sort or other.

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And, there's a, a very explicit statement

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that clinicians have a warrant to, proceed

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with a strong recommendation without detailed discussion

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with the patient, which is kind of striking, I think.

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And, it certainly clashes with the best intentions

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of person-centered medicine.

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Right? The other thing, of course, is that the idea

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of typical patients is really

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concerning when you think about the heterogeneity

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of clinical practice.

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You think about psychiatry for a second, right?

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You know, if a theory of evidence is being constructed

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with little regard for the heterogeneity of practice,

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what counts as,

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best clinical evidence might very well change

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from field to field.

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But there's no nuancing in EBM framework.

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Definitely is a one size fits all.

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A lot of examples about this,

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but I'll just focus on two familiar ones

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and try to stay away from more obscure ones.

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So we'll go back to the, the face coverings.

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Refer that word to masking for lots of reasons,

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because in Canada we had some issues about masks

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and face coverings

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and the constitutionality,

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which negatively impacted immigrant groups.

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I'm sorry if I'm being political,

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but you know, they very early in the pandemic,

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the World Health Organization, a strong proponent

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of evidence-based medicine, advocated that the public

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of wearing a face coverings conferred no

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benefit over and above.

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So distancing and curbing the transmission of COVID-19

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and setting Sweden

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and a couple of countries aside,

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most public health officials kind of parroted that message,

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which became kind of standard at the time.

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There was really a dear, like, little evidence that sort

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of squares with the EBM guideline of what constitutes good

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or valid evidence examining the issue, directly.

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And the response in the World Health Organization was, well,

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okay, there's an absence of evidence that we proponents

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of EBM would take as evidence.

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So we'll take this as no evidence

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that face coverings provide, social benefit, right?

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So in the absence of RCTs, were just assumed as no evidence,

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the trials that were had been carried on were kind

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of compromised in some ways by EBMS criteria

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of methodological rigor.

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And they were focused not on covid,

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they were focused on other infectious agents, influenza,

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middle East respiratory syndrome, and sars.

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And they were focused on source protection,

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but not source control, which is a d issue altogether.

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So that's one example I think where kind of thinking that,

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you know, in a perfect world, we will have a trial

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to tell us what to do so we can feel safe

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and certain generalizing to a bigger population where,

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kind of a narrowness, did not help manage

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because there were all kinds

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of stories afoot about field epidemiologists were very early

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in the pandemic, early 2020, that people were being

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infected, from contagious people

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more than a meter apart.

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So this is tied in with, routes of transmission

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and airborne transmission.

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The interesting thing about this is that, I mean,

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it took the World Health Organization two years to say,

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airborne transmission and put it on the front page.

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And there were legions of field epidemiologists, physicians,

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aerosol experts, engineers saying, look,

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this very disconcerting.

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So the interesting question is, you know, why was this sort

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of course a public health experts

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and aerosol scientists, engineers, why did the who not,

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listen to those people?

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And one answer that one finds frequently is

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because the World Health Organization was on side

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with some problematic assumptions about

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how the virus attacks us, about how the virus itself works.

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But I think the underlying reason is the view about evidence

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that impacted the world organization.

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That is kind of the legacy of EBM.

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Field Epidemiology reports were dismissed

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by the World Health Organization as proof

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of airborne transmission on the grounds

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that the evidence was not relevant.

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So it was not a weight, it wasn't appropriate.

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We're not gonna think about this right now.

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The World Health Organization also relied upon a

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narrow range of experts.

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So their group, physicians,

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I think there were at least 30 of them,

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they were thinking about spread of an,

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of a pathogen in a closed, hospital

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and a clinical environment.

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But that group had no expertise in the physics

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of airborne transmission transmission outside

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of closed clinical environments.

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I mean, that's kind of a, one of the other sort

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of lessons in the pandemic is,

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I'm not criticizing the management of the pandemic.

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I certainly would not wanna have that job,

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but a lot of assumptions, not just about the best way

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to proceed in terms of developing effective strategies,

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but the best way to be ethical with respect

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to the allocation of scarce resources and research

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and all that kind of stuff, was kind

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of generalized from clinical settings.

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And, you know, there were all sorts of new ethical issues

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that emerged during the pandemic

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that aren't just a general sort of view of

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what was going on in hospitals.

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So that, that's two ways.

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I think that thinking about evidence more broadly

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and thinking in terms of the preponderance

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of evidence rather than particular source of evidence,

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would've been helpful because we've all been so busy

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with the fallout of the pandemic.

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I haven't been able to push forward much on this,

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but I've been thinking more about misinformation

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as an important reason for the erosion

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of trust in public health.

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That's kind of where I'm focused these days.

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But, you know, I wanna say they know that one,

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there are many different sources of medical knowledge,

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you know, population studies.

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One of these medical knowledge can be gleaned in a number

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of other ways.

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Observation, recording of observations,

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basic science reasoning from mechanisms, patient narratives

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as a narrative based medicine.

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And, information now about a person's own genes

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or proteins to prevent, diagnosed

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or treat disease as a precision medicine. So we have all

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These different kind of different,

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medical epistemologies,

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and right now it's kind of like a medical sectarianism.

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We're all sort of over here and in different places,

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and maybe not as usefully connected as they might be,

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but it's difficult because we have these,

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EBM hierarchies, right?

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And so the source of medical knowledge coming from these

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other places is kind of set that aside

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or thought to be confer, less certainty than randomized,

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controlled high, trials down

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with the hierarchies has been a man for, for quite a while.

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And, you know, Jacobs Senga was a philosopher

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of medicine in Cambridge, was at the University of Toronto

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for a couple of years,

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wrote a fantastic paper with that as the title.

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And it's kind of been a rallying cry for people

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who are just kind of concerned about the proliferation

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and spread, unquestioned spread, EBM.

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And so, you know,

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and it's really kind of a call to think that for a piece of,

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information to pass evidence of muster.

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I don't know if that's an actual phrase,

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but I'm making it up evidential muster.

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Uh, so it's, worthiness, it has

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to pass both criteria for evidence,

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and it has to be, you know, valid, you know, according

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to our research methods, but it also must be appropriate

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and relevant and have weight and be socially impactful.

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That's another lesson from the Pandemic.

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We're all thinking that philosophers like me should be

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saying stuff that is socially relevant and impactful.

Reevaluating Evidence-Based Medicine in Pandemics

00:00:00 - I came at this much before the pandemic. Looking at EBM and what's considered to be a narrow focus on, derivations from population studies, looking at legal literature in other areas where evidence of reasoning is really been, studied and theorized, there is standardly a distinction between evidence that it, I mean, we can use the word goodness, you may not wanna use that. That is valid according to standard research methods. And the law would be how one gives a deposition of some sort
00:00:36 - has weight in some sense. And both of those criteria need to be met for something as admitted as evidence in, in, in most legal jurisdictions. So I, I started thinking about EBM from that point of view. And, you know, the article mentions, pithy comment by my deceased brilliant colleague Ian Hacking, who we wrote a lot about statistics and probability that very, you know, evidence in principle is something
00:01:04 - But in fact, as I pointed out, that sometimes it is not persuasive, even evidence that sometimes seems to be gleaned using the best re or what we think of as the best research methods may not be persuasive. And I thought, I wrote this at the very beginning of the pandemic, and it was a time when there was a great deal of debate about routes of transmission for covid and, you know, the effectiveness of some public health measures like social distancing and face masking and the rest of those things.
00:01:35 - of the conversation is a muddled because these two things are being rolled together. What we're looking for here to find our way out of the pandemic is evidence that's good according to the certain criteria, in particular criteria we would associate with the evidence-based medicine movement, the World Health Organization, like hundreds of other organizations bought into EBM, which as you know, privileges, population studies, tries to generate policy sometimes during the pandemic,
00:02:07 - for individual patients based upon the normal, patient or what happened in the study group. So I, I wanted to address that in this paper and led a different framework for thinking about evidence. You know, a BM has been very masterful at putting a books of guidelines and all the rest of this stuff and handbooks, but there is a theory of evidence that underpins, EBM, but it has never been, like spelled out as a theoretical position.
00:02:40 - of evidence should satisfy. One related to the goodness, validity, reliability, depending on your take on that on one side. But on the other side, the relevance, persuasiveness appropriateness of evidence as well. The EBM over a series of publications has kind of refined their view and changed it In some ways. Many people would say not, there haven't been as responsive to concerns about how patient preference values,

Evaluating Evidence in Medicine Practices

00:03:08 - for making clinical recommendations. But there were other concerns as well because, you know, in, in the most recent iteration evidence-based medicine, how to practice and teach it, it says quite explicitly the best research evidence. By best research evidence, we mean valid and clinically relevant research. So the relevance criterion, which I think needs to be sorted out from the, the goodness criterion, they're kind of both in there together. So, you know, good evidence is evidence that's accrued
00:03:42 - And which is kind of an odd thing because medicine is this place with many different research method side by side with one another. Different sorts of movements about what counts as medical knowledge and narrative based medicine, precision medicine, person centered medicine. And the rest of them, there are many more. And you know, EBM kind of hold kind of a Trump position here, but through the creation of the grade system, right? The grade framework, which kind of creates a hierarchy
00:04:14 - of medical knowledge, putting statistically derived information from population studies, RCTs, randomized controlled trials, and you know, meta, meta studies. Those meta studies by the way, only include RCTs. They don't include observational studies or cohort studies or many other ways that we could try to become better informed about any issue at hand. So I don't think there's been much pivoting in the evidence-based movement. It just seems to be rolling along in much the same way.
00:04:43 - to some extent was a wake up call because most public health agencies, as you know, the s general of the United States lost his position in part because he was parroting something that the World Health Organization was saying. You know, we in Canada, our so-called top Doctor didn't lose her position, but there were many people who thought that she should, I'm not saying I'm one of them, but clearly it was just following and World Health organization's footsteps on a number of issues that were pivotable pivotal to thinking about the best strategies to manage a pandemic
00:05:16 - that evidence-based medicine proponents of evidence-based medicine, made very early. I don't suggest in this paper we're talking, that's the background for our conversation today, but in other places, the grade system evaluation gives approval for clinicians to kind of step outside of directly asking a patient about their various preferences, information about the patient based on normal patient, that something called a normal patient that emerges in the context of trials of one sort or other.
00:05:49 - that clinicians have a warrant to, proceed with a strong recommendation without detailed discussion with the patient, which is kind of striking, I think. And, it certainly clashes with the best intentions of person-centered medicine. Right? The other thing, of course, is that the idea of typical patients is really concerning when you think about the heterogeneity of clinical practice. You think about psychiatry for a second, right? You know, if a theory of evidence is being constructed

Challenges in Evidence-Based Medicine and Public Health

00:06:22 - what counts as, best clinical evidence might very well change from field to field. But there's no nuancing in EBM framework. Definitely is a one size fits all. A lot of examples about this, but I'll just focus on two familiar ones and try to stay away from more obscure ones. So we'll go back to the, the face coverings. Refer that word to masking for lots of reasons, because in Canada we had some issues about masks and face coverings and the constitutionality,
00:06:52 - I'm sorry if I'm being political, but you know, they very early in the pandemic, the World Health Organization, a strong proponent of evidence-based medicine, advocated that the public of wearing a face coverings conferred no benefit over and above. So distancing and curbing the transmission of COVID-19 and setting Sweden and a couple of countries aside, most public health officials kind of parroted that message, which became kind of standard at the time.
00:07:25 - of squares with the EBM guideline of what constitutes good or valid evidence examining the issue, directly. And the response in the World Health Organization was, well, okay, there's an absence of evidence that we proponents of EBM would take as evidence. So we'll take this as no evidence that face coverings provide, social benefit, right? So in the absence of RCTs, were just assumed as no evidence, the trials that were had been carried on were kind
00:07:56 - of methodological rigor. And they were focused not on covid, they were focused on other infectious agents, influenza, middle East respiratory syndrome, and sars. And they were focused on source protection, but not source control, which is a d issue altogether. So that's one example I think where kind of thinking that, you know, in a perfect world, we will have a trial to tell us what to do so we can feel safe and certain generalizing to a bigger population where,
00:08:27 - because there were all kinds of stories afoot about field epidemiologists were very early in the pandemic, early 2020, that people were being infected, from contagious people more than a meter apart. So this is tied in with, routes of transmission and airborne transmission. The interesting thing about this is that, I mean, it took the World Health Organization two years to say, airborne transmission and put it on the front page.
00:09:01 - aerosol experts, engineers saying, look, this very disconcerting. So the interesting question is, you know, why was this sort of course a public health experts and aerosol scientists, engineers, why did the who not, listen to those people? And one answer that one finds frequently is because the World Health Organization was on side with some problematic assumptions about

Reevaluating Evidence in Public Health

00:09:31 - But I think the underlying reason is the view about evidence that impacted the world organization. That is kind of the legacy of EBM. Field Epidemiology reports were dismissed by the World Health Organization as proof of airborne transmission on the grounds that the evidence was not relevant. So it was not a weight, it wasn't appropriate. We're not gonna think about this right now. The World Health Organization also relied upon a
00:10:01 - So their group, physicians, I think there were at least 30 of them, they were thinking about spread of an, of a pathogen in a closed, hospital and a clinical environment. But that group had no expertise in the physics of airborne transmission transmission outside of closed clinical environments. I mean, that's kind of a, one of the other sort of lessons in the pandemic is, I'm not criticizing the management of the pandemic. I certainly would not wanna have that job,
00:10:34 - to proceed in terms of developing effective strategies, but the best way to be ethical with respect to the allocation of scarce resources and research and all that kind of stuff, was kind of generalized from clinical settings. And, you know, there were all sorts of new ethical issues that emerged during the pandemic that aren't just a general sort of view of what was going on in hospitals. So that, that's two ways. I think that thinking about evidence more broadly
00:11:03 - of evidence rather than particular source of evidence, would've been helpful because we've all been so busy with the fallout of the pandemic. I haven't been able to push forward much on this, but I've been thinking more about misinformation as an important reason for the erosion of trust in public health. That's kind of where I'm focused these days. But, you know, I wanna say they know that one, there are many different sources of medical knowledge, you know, population studies. One of these medical knowledge can be gleaned in a number
00:11:34 - Observation, recording of observations, basic science reasoning from mechanisms, patient narratives as a narrative based medicine. And, information now about a person's own genes or proteins to prevent, diagnosed or treat disease as a precision medicine. So we have all These different kind of different, medical epistemologies, and right now it's kind of like a medical sectarianism. We're all sort of over here and in different places, and maybe not as usefully connected as they might be,
00:12:09 - EBM hierarchies, right? And so the source of medical knowledge coming from these other places is kind of set that aside or thought to be confer, less certainty than randomized, controlled high, trials down with the hierarchies has been a man for, for quite a while. And, you know, Jacobs Senga was a philosopher of medicine in Cambridge, was at the University of Toronto for a couple of years, wrote a fantastic paper with that as the title.

Reevaluating Evidence in Medicine Post-Pandemic

00:12:39 - who are just kind of concerned about the proliferation and spread, unquestioned spread, EBM. And so, you know, and it's really kind of a call to think that for a piece of, information to pass evidence of muster. I don't know if that's an actual phrase, but I'm making it up evidential muster. so it's, worthiness, it has to pass both criteria for evidence, and it has to be, you know, valid, you know, according
00:13:20 - and relevant and have weight and be socially impactful. That's another lesson from the Pandemic. We're all thinking that philosophers like me should be saying stuff that is socially relevant and impactful.

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