Evidenced-Based Medicine: Friend or Foe?
No one likes preauthorization/utilization, review/physician peer review, or whatever term your specific jurisdiction uses to establish the process where the treating provider must seek the endorsement of their patient treatment plan, through the workers' compensation system. To attempt to control costs, many jurisdictions have adopted a process where healthcare interventions are reviewed prior to the application of said care. Fortunately, as an initial arbitrator, the concept of evidence-based medicine has been applied to this process. The phrase “evidence-based medicine” has been in the medical lexicon for approximately 25 years. The original definition has been amended and expanded to fit a revolving healthcare culture. Evidence-based medicine does not represent the most current medical practice; it represents the best-established practice in the application of healthcare. It is designed to present the most effective and cost-efficient healthcare available to address a specific problem. Critics claim that evidence-based medicine and other “guidelines” are “cookbooks” that limit medical practice. The utilization of such guidelines has been declared to be dogmatic, inflexible, and too uniform. However, applying the standards of evidence-based medicine and utilizing the adapted guidelines specific to any particular jurisdiction is anything but a limitation on appropriate/effective medical application. A combination of [...]