ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an account of the most frequent objections and elaborates on points made by opponents of evidence-based practice (EBP). There are also misperceptions that EBP denigrates clinical expertise, ignores patient values and preferences, promotes a cookbook approach to practice, is a cost-cutting tool or an ivory-tower concept. Physicist and philosopher of science John Ziman wrote that the history of science is a chronicle of bitter intellectual controversies between strongly partisan groups. It has been several decades since some of the original ideas of EBP first emerged in evidence-based medicine (EBM) as a response to the shortcomings of medical practice. One common ground for most controversies is the limits and uncertainty of scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is always an estimate of or hypothesis about a real-world phenomenon that is subject to perpetual change and therefore will manifest differently in time and place. Further, real-world phenomena are complex, especially in social and behavioral contexts.
