There is, to some extent a confidence that Evidence Based Medicine is an all encompassing component of medical care. Certainly it is a position that all practitioners and clinicians would feel a high level of confidence about their daily work if this was true. The CAM community is frequently accused of pursuing strategies that have no, or at best a controversial evidence basis. This in part is true, there are many proposed reasons why including of course financial ones.
There is much to be done to clarify the role of CAM in human health, but there also remains much to be done to clarify the role of conventional medicine. This was explored in an editorial by the BMJ Clinical Evidence Journal where they also provide a definition of the descriptors: Beneficial:Harmful.
They found that of about 2,500 treatments offered in conventional medicine:
- 13 percent are beneficial to the patient
- 23 percent are likely to be beneficial
- 8 percent is a trade-off between benefits and harm
- 6 percent are unlikely to be beneficial
- 4 percent are likely to be ineffective or harmful
- 46 percent have unknown effectiveness
States BMJ: “…the figures above suggest that the research community has a large task ahead and that most decisions about treatments still rest on the individual judgments of clinicians and patients.
