Abstract
Certainly one of the greatest trends in medicine over the last decade has been the rise of a new mode of medical practice and medical education: Evidence-Based Medicine, the promulgation of practice guidelines, and other associated developments. Speaking, perhaps, in an overly simplistic way, we might say that there was once a notion of an academic physician as a master of the profession—whose mastery was characterized by experience, judgment, knowledge and clinical know-how, and other more or less ineffable aspects of the practice. While some grumbling about this certainly occurs among older doctors, physicians as a group are remarkably complacent about these developments, accepting them without any significant critical examination. Any clinician with familiarity with this class of medications is aware that they just are not all that effective. Turner’s work on publication of drug trials, however, is not the only evidence that has come out.