Another Day, Another Guideline — Part I
Unscientific Guidelines Are Being Peddled As ‘Evidence-Based’ Medicine
And it’s harming unsuspecting Americans…
First, let’s define our terms. What exactly is ‘evidence-based medicine’ or EBM? The Evidence-Based Medicine Working Group communicated in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that EBM ‘de-emphasizes intuition, unsystematic clinical experience, and pathophysiologic rationale as sufficient grounds for clinical decision making and stresses the examination of evidence from clinical research.’[1]
Now, let’s dig in.
For those of you who may be unaware, in 2016 the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) published a guideline for prescribing analgesics for chronic pain. The guideline was ostensibly only meant for primary care physicians but in the wake of all of the hysteria surrounding analgesic medications, millions of patients have been forced to lower their dose to 50–90 milligrams based on the unscientific ‘Morphine Milligram Equivalent’ or MME, while many others have been forced off of analgesics entirely with devastating consequences.
