My Issue with So-Called "Evidence-Based Practice"

At its worst, “Evidence-Based Practice” invites us to abandon our own base of experience, suspend our reliance on intuition, and place the locus of authority in the hands of academicians who in practice subscribe to a scarily narrow ”way of knowing.” Additionally, we are often encouraged (bullied, in the Academy) to discount or ignore knowledge bases, wisdom traditions, spiritual practices and other such epistemologies that have not been put through the grinder of social science’s current sanctioned methodologies. To me, this is parallel to saying “I refuse to consider any research that was not published in the English language.” Well, hell, you’ll be missing a lot, then.

Oh, by the way, MOST knowledge bases, wisdom traditions, spiritual practices, and aspects of the human experience have not been through that grinder. Cultures that do not completely (or at all) subscribe to the western scientific method clearly would have little to no interest in doing so. “Evidence-Based Practice” would require that we ignore all such stuff until it is studied at The Ohio State University, or some such.

And also, the social sciences are not science, and imposing the so-called “scientific method” template on human phenomena does not yield “scientific findings.” That’s my take, anyway. (And yes, I’ve done research, been published…)

One looming complexity is such that the isolation of alternative explanatory variables is probably often not even really possible.

Another note: The scientific method aligns very conveniently with a Myers-Briggs STJ sensibility, and not at all, really, with an NFP sensibility.

How one group gets to dictate for all of humanity what ways of knowing are legitimate and may be taken seriously would be a mystery, except it’s not. ST (and J) are more likely to think they have a bead on the truth because this culture values logic, linearity, data, and measurability so much. And they are more likely to get their hands on the steering wheel of the academic bus.

Whole populations get dismissed in these conversations.

Talk about disrespecting diversity.

One of my favorite statistics is that the modal number of research studies undertaken by Counseling Psychologists, post dissertation, is zero. Think about that.

“You can make me do that once, but I sure as hell ain’t doing it again.”