Another highly influential buzz-phrase in contemporary medical discourse is ‘evidence based medicine’ (EBM). Many medical people believe this is a fairly recent step in the history of medical progress; historians on the other hand have questioned the novelty of the phenomenon and pointed to its long durée and that evidence based (i.e., empirical) medical practice is in principle going back all the way to classical antiquity.
Whatever the historical precedents, however, EBM is a phenomon that is bound to stay with us. But it is not that easy to find good introductions to EBM; a recent collection of links to websites of tutorials, powerpont presentations, pdf-files, etc. on the commercial New Media Medicine Blog gives an updated and potentially useful overview of the present state of the art of EBM (caveat: I haven’t gone thorugh the links to see if they all favour the company, New Media Medicine Ltd. 🙂