Evidence-Based Medicine and the Hard Problem of Multimorbidity

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) rests on the proposition that questions in clinical medicine can be formalized, or reduced, into statistical questions. In the reductionist tradition, these statistical questions can then be addressed by studies designed to isolate the effect of a single exposure (typically an intervention) on a single disease outcome. While the results directly address the statistical question, inferences derived from the results are applied back to the complex clinical realm—where generalists live.