Excellent article. It is a sad irony that Evidence-Based Medicine was pushed with the aim of driving out superstitious thinking from medical practice, but has resulted in a system that is difficult to separate from a religious cult.

Doctors employing EBM robotically avoid any thinking on their own part, never asking what might best suit the patient but instead inflicting the ‘treatment’ on them on the basis that it is ‘evidence-based’. Although I have tried repeatedly over many years, it has been impossible to tempt even one doctor into a rational discussion on what this evidence actually says or to convince them to acknowledge real-life evidence in front of their eyes…

There are so many examples I could give. For example, a Cochrane meta-analysis shows that only 1 in 8 people actually benefit from SSRIs (in other words, 7 out of 8 people have no chance to benefit from having their neurochemistry). No patients are told this, only that they are “evidence-based”. Meta-analyses on statins show that the NNT (Number Needed to Treat) is 167 (to avoid one death over five years of use), yet one in five experienced serious side-effects. No patients are told this either, only that they are “evidence-based”.

But the biggest issue I have is that EBM is increasingly just a shield that cowardly doctors use to hide behind. It’s not that they have simply become overly-enamoured with Randomized Controlled Trials and Meta-Analyses that it clouds their thinking. They use it as a justification to not think.

One example stands out more than any other: November 2024. Acute neurology ward in Darent Valley Hospital, Kent, UK. My dad had a stroke. On Day 3, I get to speak to the consultant. He explains that the bad news is that my dad’s stroke was ‘massive’, but the good news is that he was showing signs of recovery that they’d never seen before in 20 years (‘something really unusual is going on’). I explained that this was because he had been receiving a cocktail of neuroprotectants, antioxidants, pro-mitochondrial support and red light therapy from the first evening. He told me I had to stop these immediately. The reason given? “They are not evidence-based”.

I stayed up until 3am preparing a 16-page document that demonstrated the evidence base unequivocally supported the efficacy and safety of these interventions. The evidence based included the Randomized Controlled Trials that the doctors profess to love so much (with many even conducted specifically in acute stroke recovery). To put the weight of this evidence in perspective, there are a meta-analysis of 19 trials using red light showed a mean improvement of 12.3 on the Modified Barthel Index. To put this into real terms, this can be the difference between needing a carer for the rest of one’s life and living a pretty normal life. And this was from the red light alone, not accounting for the additive/synergistic effects of Magnesium, Lion’s Mane, DMSO, Melatonin, NAD+, etc etc, plus PEMF.

The doctor’s response, in seeing that the evidence base clearly and emphatically supported the use of these agents? “We aren’t in a position to assess the evidence, we just follow guidelines. You have to stop them now.”

EBM has become a gateway through which pharmaceutical companies control medical treatment (inevitable when all evidence other than Randomized Controlled Trials are disregarded, and the staggering cost of such trials means that almost all are funded by the same pharmaceutical companies). But it’s also become a shield for cowardly doctors to use to protect their egos, shrieking “WE NEED RCTs” when any patient (or their family members) refuse to worship at the Font of Corporate Medicine strategies are suggested and then squealing “YES BUT GUIDELINES” when the evidence they claim obedience to fails to provide the finding they want.

Karl Popper’s take was that a scientific hypothesis must be defined by its capacity to be falsified. If such a hypothesis can be falsified but a doctor proceeds with it anyway, this is not science. This is religion.

(PS. I didn’t stop giving my dad supplements/red light. They moved him to a different ward so that ‘he could be watched 24-7’ to stop me from providing him with this support. The nurses tasked with guarding him were thankfully useless at the task. I carried on. They called the police for ‘safeguarding reasons’. Thankfully, the police laughed at this. Dad was cleared to leave the hospital after 15 days, 10 weeks ahead of the estimated timeline. His speech is still in recovery but he was playing football with his grandson around a month later. I made a complaint to the hospital, who investigated themselves and determined they did everything right. Legal action still in the pipeline).