scholarly journals Literary Ethnography of Evidence-Based Healthcare: Accessing the Emotions of Rational-Technical Discourse

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 95-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benet Reid

In this article I revisit the idea of literary ethnography (proposed by Van De Poel-Knottnerus and Knottnerus, 1994 ) as a method for investigating social phenomena constituted principally through literature. I report the use of this method to investigate the topic of evidence-based healthcare, EBHC. EBHC is a field of discourse much built upon a dichotomy between rationality and emotionality. In this context literary ethnography, a particular type of discourse analysis, is valuable for allowing researchers to bring the emotional currents of technical-rational discourse into conscious awareness. In such discourses, emotions are not written out by name. The researcher must discern emotional phenomena by experiencing the discourse, and (try to) bring them into intelligible expression. As I clarify this process I develop Van de Poel-Knottnerus and Knottnerus’ method theoretically, look to destabilise the rationality-emotionality dichotomy foundational to discourse around EBHC, and so transgress its conventional lines of thought.

BMJ ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 346 (feb06 1) ◽  
pp. f766-f766 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Heneghan ◽  
F. Godlee

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paulo Cesar Morales Mayer ◽  
Caroline Amélia Gonçalves ◽  
Franz Porzsolt

Abstract Background: Evidence-Based healthcare deals basically with published clinical trials to guide the decision making on what treatment to use for any specific conditions.Aims: The present paper assessed the inclusion and exclusion criteria used in clinical trials of cervical cancer aiming at establishing a clear distinction between each criterion.Methods: We performed a bibliographical search in pubmed with the terms cervical cancer and treatment or therapy filtered for clinical trials with human subjects for the last ten years. A total of 30 papers were used extracting and classifying the inclusion and exclusion category according to the characteristic they described. Results: We found no clear parameter to establish which criteria could exclusively serve as inclusion or exclusion across the papers, about 56% of the categories identified were found either listed as inclusion or exclusion criteria or even as both in some cases.Conclusions: The key issue of selection criteria is not in its form but in its function, the first point to consider is if the trial is experimental (focused on efficacy and proof of principle) or observational (pragmatic trials, focused on effectiveness and real world conditions). We suggest, inclusion criteria should be broad, focused on the investigated condition; exclusion criteria should apply only to the subset of this “included” population, and do not take part in observational studies. These conclusions do not serve only for researchers but should affect practitioners and policy makers to correctly compare the results of investigated treatment.


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