Time to abandon Evidence Based Medicine?

This is the title of a talk Professor David Healy gave in November 2012 at the Cardiff University.1 I came across it by chance, while surfing on the internet and reading the comments posted on the BMJ forum, Doc2Doc.2 While watching the video, it was a bit of a surprise to me to see a network meta-analysis on antidepressants I published in the Lancet in 2009, quoted to show how much evidence is biased in favour of pharmaceutical companies. The bottom line of the talk was: as we do not have access to all study data and most of randomised controlled trials are flawed or misconducted, conclusions from systematic reviews and meta-analyses—even when carried out by researchers from independent institutions—are misleading. Clinicians should better rely on their experience and not follow evidence-based clinical guidelines. This is what I understood from this speech and is likely to be what others will have grasped as a take-home message.