Ethics and the Role of Guidelines in Medical Practice
Over the past three decades, evidence-based medicine (EBM)—the use of evidence from clinical studies in making decisions about the care of individual patients—has gained a stronghold in the everyday practice of medicine. EBM’s recognized limitation is that statistically significant outcomes from numbers of patients cannot predict the likelihood of an outcome for an individual patient. This gap between what has been shown to be good for the many and what may be good for the one is replete with ethical questions that this month’s authors examine and answer.