The Campbell Academy Blog | Colin Campbell (234)

Evidence base VS Experience

Jason Smithson has launched a podcast with Alan Meade (he who does dental hacks in America).

The first one is Smithson on… science, great discussion between Jason and Alan in this podcast about different cultures in health care in parts of the world and who respects evidence and who respects experience.

We’ve gone from one side of the pendulum scale (experience only) to the other side (evidence only).

Evidence based health care is now the “law” in our country even in the absence of evidence for the procedure that you’re providing.

Experience in carrying out procedures seems to have decreased and fallen down the ladder.

You can see why this has happened, these people have used experience trap to sell and to sell things which don’t work, just because people are paying them.

The evidence-based format, seemed to look like it would be an antidote to that, but of course then, in many areas, the evidence became biased and influenced by finance in any event.

How to square the circle then?

Jason suggests in the podcast, whether in the United States people were much more interested to hear how many of the procedures you had done and to see examples of your own, where is in the United Kingdom everything had to be backed up with multiple references.

How about both?

How about experienced clinicians talking about the procedure that they’ve carried out over many years and then showing objective evidence related to that (perhaps together with their own evidence) to cement this.

What about being completely honest about where you see the bias in your presentations?

What about reputation?

Your reputation is your brand and your brand is what allows people to trust you, when you present either evidence or experience or both, people don’t buy evidence base and they don’t buy experience. People buy trust, you can use either of the evidence base or your experience or both to build trust, but the bottom line is that trust is build over time.