Evidence-based medicine (EBM), after 25 years, has generated substantial advances in research methodology and has made it possible to distinguish more clearly between good and bad treatments, to identify biases of any order and even evidence of conflicts of interest between research and industry. However, a group of English authors (The importance of values in EBM, Kelly MP 2016) believes that, despite the uncontested advances, EBM has put too much focus on the technical aspects and has forgotten that values have a lot of influence at all stages of the evidence-building processes.
What do we mean when we talk about values?
Science strives to understand the world as it is, but conversely, values are what humans reflect upon. Seen this way, the conflict is served and, therefore EBM should learn to navigate better between these two waters according to the authors of the article quoted below, "Values may act as heuristics – shortcuts in our thinking of which we are barely aware – which get us to quick answers to complicated problems. They form the lens through which we perceive and act on our world. Values are often tricky to pin down because they are such a pervasive part of things we take for granted. A necessary first step towards achieving this is to make our values as explicit as we can, so that we can reflect on them individually and deliberate on them collectively".
