What Jury Duty Taught Me About Evidence Based Practice

Like many well intentioned movements, “evidenced based practice” has been hijacked, politicized, and corrupted. While in many instances the spirit behind the movement inspires providers to think more critically and question personal biases, in others it creates division and suppresses dialogue. “Science” and “evidence” are often reduced to rhetorical forms of grandstanding, especially on social media platforms that reward adversarial behavior and binary thinking. To be sure, I am not suggesting that medical providers “do things the way they’ve always done them” or that research and objective data should not inform clinical practice. Research, whose quality varies immensely, is not synonymous with evidence, however. Moreover, it remains unclear what individual or collective bodies should preside over “evidence”. Writing “evidenced based” in one’s twitter bio doesn’t make one an arbiter of evidence, blue check mark or not.

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