A Post-Structuralist View of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM)

Evidence-based medicine has been praised for its enormous contribution to information processing, and for other achievements. Most of the criticism has been directed at its conceptual structure. This criticism has been levelled by philosophers and doctors, such as Miles, Loughlin and Polychronis. My own approach is to develop a viewpoint on EBM from post-structuralism. I have drawn on the work of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, a celebration of smooth space and nomadic science. In this chapter I place the doctor with the patient and her problems in smooth space, detour into the striated space of the medical (EBM) gaze, then back into the smooth space of the patient and her problems. I explain "smooth space", "striated space" along with the related concepts of "nomadic science" and "State science", and I explain the "medical gaze" which I update to the "EBM gaze."