Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Click here to sign up for SAGE Journal Email Alerts today!
Health:
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Right arrow Citation Map
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Cronje, R.
Right arrow Articles by Fullan, A.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow Articles by Cronje, R.
Right arrow Articles by Fullan, A.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati  
What's this?

Evidence-Based Medicine: Toward a New Definition of `Rational' Medicine

Ruth Cronje

University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, USA cronjerj{at}uwec.edu

Amanda Fullan

University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, USA

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) promises to make the practice of medicine more fully `rational', thereby increasing medicine's reliability and improving patient health outcomes. However, intractable ethical and epistemic problems with applying a model of rationality that privileges quantifiable `evidence' in medical practice - evidence often at odds with nonquantifiable patient experiences, values and preferences - have prompted some within the medical community to condemn EBM. This article analyzes textual evidence from the medical literature as the medical community's effort to rhetorically renegotiate a new model of rationality, one which both preserves rationality's promise to protect medical decision making from the dogmatic, subjective and arbitrary and permits nonquantifiable patient experiences, values and preferences to play a legitimate role in rational diagnostic and therapeutic decision making.

Key Words: Brown • evidence-based medicine • Habermas • patient welfare • rationality

Health:, Vol. 7, No. 3, 353-369 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/1363459303007003006
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati    What's this?