This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

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Modern medicine is based on good evidence,

randomized control trials and so on.

This gives us a reliable scientific basis on which to judge which treatments work and why, right?

Not necessarily. John Worrell explores our understanding of causal connections in medicine

and questions whether randomized control trials are everything they're cracked up to be.

John Woll, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here.

The topic we're talking about today is evidence-based medicine.

What is that?

Well, it's a good question. There was a particular movement that began

at McMaster University in Canada in the 1980s that believed, rightly or wrongly, that a

lot of what masqueraded as evidence in medicine was no such thing

and when you examined it according to the best scientific principles of when you have and don't

have evidence for a theory it didn't stand up and it set out to

rectify that situation principally via randomised control trials.

The implication was that they wanted all trials to be randomly controlled.

What does that mean?

...