[extropy-chat] Are vaccinations useless?

[Jeff Medina]

On 3/20/06, Damien Sullivan <phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 19, 2006 at 11:04:31PM -0500, Jeff Medina wrote:
>
> > worthwhile.  You don't mean to suggest that all, or nearly all, of the
> > treatments suggested by doctors are backed up by RCTs, do you?  Or
>
> Why not?  It's what I'd have expected, and it's exactly what Rafal says:

And it may be so; I claim no expertise here.  But from the little I
have come across, such a claim doesn't appear to accord with the
Evidence-Based Medicine movement currently building.

"Evidence-based medicine is a methodology for evaluating the validity
of research in clinical medicine and applying the results to the care
of individual patients. Evidence is gathered through systematic review
of the literature, and is critically appraised.  The results are then
integrated with physician/patient decision making." (from
http://www.ebmny.org/thecentr2.html)

If your & Rafal's view is right and the majority of medical practice
is backed up by well-done RCTs, why are so many scholars &
institutions talking about and working on EBM like it's something new;
something that isn't done enough, nor taught enough?  (One can browse
the rest of the site pointed to by the URL above for some more
information, along with Google and various medical &
philosophy-of-medicine journals.)

--
Jeff Medina
http://www.painfullyclear.com/

Community Director
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
http://www.singinst.org/

Relationships & Community Fellow
Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies
http://www.ieet.org/

School of Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/phil/