Health Care Renewal Bloggers to Teach Short Course on Why Physicians Do Not Make Rational, Evidence-Based Decisions

Health Care Renewal bloggers Dr Roy Poses and Dr Wally Smith will be teaching a short course on Sunday, October 23, 2016, at the annual North American meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The course title will be "Why Do Physicians Not Make Rational, Evidence-Based Decisions, and What Might Help?"

We will emphasize many topics relevant to Health Care Renewal.  These will include:

- physician level factors that affect decision making, emphasizing the influence of extraneous values (values that should not be taken into account by physicians when making decisions as an agent for patients), such as perverse incentives, particularly conflicts of interest;

- problems with the evidence on which evidence-based decisions ostensibly ought to be based, including manipulation and suppression of clinical research studies, which may happen when research is sponsored by organizations with vested interests in having the research show particular results; and

- problems with ostensibly evidence-based clinical practice guidelines which are often taken to be the "gold-standard" for rational evidence-based decision making, especially the role of vested interests in constructing these guidelines.

We hope to see some of our Health Care Renewal readers there.