Since I met the character limit on the previous post, I couldn't give the more expanded definition of evidence based medicine. Here it is:
Evidence-based medicine has been defined by its proponents as the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. In this definition, the practice of evidence-based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with a critical appraisal of the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research. By individual clinical expertise is meant the proficiency and judgment that 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 is meant 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 factors, and the efficacy and safety of therapeutic, rehabilitative, and preventive regimens. The practice of evidence-based medicine is a process of lifelong, self-directed learning in which caring for one's own patients creates the need for clinically important information about diagnosis, prognosis, therapy, and other clinical and health care issues, and in which its practitioners:
1. Convert these information needs into answerable questions. 2. Track down, with maximum efficiency, the best evidence with which to answer them (and making increasing use of secondary sources of the best evidence). Examples of such secondary sources are the Cochrane Library and journals of critically appraised clinical articles such as ACP Journal Club and Evidence-Based Medicine. 3. Critically appraise that evidence for its validity (closeness to the truth) and usefulness (clinical applicability). 4. Integrate the appraisal with clinical expertise and apply the results in clinical practice. 5. Evaluate one's own performance.
The rest of the article (probably behind paywall) is here:
Evidence-based Medicine - Encyclopedia of Biostatistics - Sackett - Wiley Online Library
Nothing about quadruple-blind peer-reviewed studies conducted in the darkest recesses of pharmaceutical company basements here. Rather than erecting a bogeyman, I think it's important to know what evidence based medicine actually is.