Since forever I've been reading seemingly authoritative papers and articles from the Cochrane Reviews et al lauding "Evidence-Based Medicine" as the gold standard for evaluating treatments/drugs/testing etc.
There's only one problem with these: they're often authored by people who've never gotten their hands dirty, as it were, doing basic science — whether it be laboratory-based or clinical — that's reported in the scientific literature.
These grand panjandrums haven't a clue how shot through with arbitrary choices and decisions are the final data reported by the scientists writing the articles.
I know this for a fact because I was one of those scientists for many years, publishing dozens of papers in the premier journals of anesthesiology over decades.
You could look it up.
But I digress.
The "sausage," as it were — the raw data which form the basis of all such papers — gets cleaned up by necessity, because it's a hot mess in its initial state as individual data points.
But in the end the data reported are not objective but, rather, subjective, choices: there's far too much noise to generate a signal without processing.
Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?
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