The individual patient and evidence-based medicine

In 1997 article (PMID: 9190027) about evidence-based medicine David Sackett writes:

Evidence-based medicine... is the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The practice of evidence-based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research. By individual clinical expertise we mean the proficiency and judgment that we individual clinicians acquire through clinical experience and clinical practice. Increased expertise is reflected in many ways, but especially in more effective and efficient diagnosis and in the more thoughtful identification and compassionate use of individual patients' predicaments, rights, and preferences in making clinical decisions about their care. By best available external clinical evidence we mean clinically relevant research, often from the basic sciences of medicine, but especially from patient centered clinical research into the accuracy and precision of diagnostic tests (including the clinical examination), the power of prognostic markers, and the efficacy and safety of therapeutic, rehabilitative, and preventive regimens. External clinical evidence both invalidates previously accepted diagnostic tests and treatment and replaces them with new ones that are more powerful, more accurate, more efficacious, and safer. Good doctors use both individual clinical expertise and the best available external evidence, and neither alone is enough. Without clinical expertise, practice risks becoming tyrannized by external evidence, for even excellent external evidence may be inapplicable to or inappropriate for an individual patient. Without current best external evidence, practice risks becoming rapidly out of date, to the detriment of patients.

On the criticism that evidence-based medicine is "cook-book medicine" Sackett writes:

Common misconceptions about evidence-based medicine include the concern that it might degenerate into "cook-book" medicine. However, because it requires a bottom-up approach that integrates the best external evidence with individual clinical expertise and patient-choice, it cannot result in slavish, "cook-book" approaches to individual patient care. External clinical evidence can inform, but can never replace, individual clinical expertise, and it is this expertise that decides whether the external evidence applies to the individual patient at all and, if so, how it should be integrated into a clinical decision. Similarly, any external guideline must be integrated with individual clinical expertise in deciding whether and how it matches the patient's clinical state, predicament, and preferences, and thus whether it should be applied.

Others fear that evidence-based medicine will be hijacked by purchasers and managers to cut the costs of health care. This would not only be a misuse of evidence-based medicine, but suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of its financial consequences. Doctors practising evidence-based medicine will identify and apply the most efficacious interventions to maximize the quality and quantity of life for individual patients; this may raise rather than lower the cost of their care.

In a 2016 article Ioannidis (PMID: 26934549) reported that evidence-based has been hijacked. I will explore this article in a later blog, but here's a couple interesting lines from the abstract:

As EBM became more influential, it was also hijacked to serve agendas different from what it originally aimed for. [...] EBM still remains an unmet goal, worthy to be attained.

Not learning about the original concept runs a risk of practicing and teaching medicine with a false belief of what evidence-based medicine is.

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note: bold text are my emphasis