P.Mean: Percentage of care that does not have a medical basis (created 2012-02-06). News: Sign up for "The Monthly Mean," the newsletter that dares to call itself average, www.pmean.com/news.

At a meeting I was attending, a statistic came up that has a controversial heritage "at least 50% of medical care has no valid scientific basis." The number cited is not always 50%, but it is almost always a number that is low enough to be alarming. Here are some resources on the basis of this statistic.

I had written a page about this topic on my old website:
--> http://www.childrensmercy.org/stats/weblog2006/GoodEvidence.aspx

I had forgotten that I had written this, but when I did a Google search on the words

On this page, I cited several sources:

Robert Todd Carroll offers some historical perspective at
--> www.skepdic.com/refuge/bunk8.html#myth3  and
--> skepdic.com/news/newsletter35.html 

I also mentioned a couple of peer-reviewed papers.
--> The evidence for evidence-based medicine. R. Imrie, D. W. Ramey. Complementary Therapies in Medicine 2000: 8(2); 123-6. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10859606
--> "Is my practice evidence-based?" T. Greenhalgh. British Medical Journal 1996: 313(7063); 957-8. www.bmj.com/content/313/7063/957.full

While the meeting was going on, I found a couple of additional resources via Google.
--> theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/how-much-modern-medicine-is-evidence-based/
--> www.miller-mccune.com/health/evidence-of-a-need-for-change-4241/

If I find additional resources, I will try to post them here.

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