“The good news is that evidence can matter. The bad news is that it often does not.”1 If imitation is the sincerest form of fl attery, the clinicians and clinical epidemiologists who promoted evidence-based medicine in the early 1990s should feel fl attered. Evidence-based medicine now has many imitators: from evidence-based nursing,2 dentistry3 and public health4 through to evidence-based soci...

This article examines the implicit promises of fairness in evidence based medicine (EBM), namely to avoid discrimination through objective processes, and to distribute effective treatments fairly. The relationship between EBM and vulnerable groups (such as those disadvantaged by virtue of poverty, ethnicity, age, gender, mental health problems or similar) is examined. Several aspects of EBM are...

Background Evidence based policy-making has been promoted as a means of ensuring better outcomes but what counts as evidence in policy-making lies within a spectrum of expert knowledge through scientifically generated information. Different actors provide varying degrees of support for and use of different types of evidence in policy development. Since not all forms of evidence share an equal v...

The field of cognitive psychology has increasingly provided scientific insights to explore how humans are subject to unconscious sources of evidentiary bias, leading to errors that can affect judgement and decision-making. Increasingly these insights are being applied outside the realm of individual decision-making to the collective arena of policy-making as well. A recent editorial in this jou...

Background: It is notoriously challenging to implement evidence-based care and to update and improve health care policy. Adhering to evidence-based Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) serves as the driving force behind making decisions based on the best evidence and making efforts for improving the quality of patient care and outcomes. Despite requiring Iranian hospitals to implement CPGs in Ja...

BACKGROUND Discussions within the health community routinely emphasise the importance of evidence in informing policy formulation and implementation. Much of the support for the evidence-based policy movement draws from concern that policy decisions are often based on inadequate engagement with high-quality evidence. In many such discussions, evidence is treated as differing only in quality, an...