ABSTRACT
Evidence-based medicine (EBM) has been defined as: 'the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The practice of evidence-based medicine means integrating individual, clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research'. Fundamental to the evidence-based approach to health care is the idea that equitable provision be guided by standards of evidence concerning the effectiveness of treatments. This chapter examines some of the problems which arise when considering an EBP approach in the psychodynamic psychotherapies. Psychodynamic psychotherapies (PDP) are, for the most part, poorly empirically supported—according to the evidential criteria commonly applied in contemporary reviews. Comparative psychotherapy studies involving psychodynamic approaches have sometimes used expert therapists —an example being the Sloan et al RCT which found psychoanalytic therapy to be equivalent in effectiveness to behaviour therapy and superior to a waiting list control condition.
