Rethinking "evidence" — Eivind Engebretsen and Mona Baker

In Pursuit of Development

In the past few decades, we have witnessed the rise and consolidation of “evidence-based medicine” among health professionals. This refers to a systematic approach to medicine in which doctors and other health care professionals use the best available scientific evidence from clinical research to help make decisions about the care of individual patients. But the COVID-19 pandemic has managed to transform what constitutes reliable medical evidence into a topic of public concern and debate. These debates have taken place within and beyond the medical establishment, such as in news reports and social media posts. And suddenly everyone began offering an opinion on the efficacy of measures such as quarantines, lock downs, school closures, and mandatory face masks. How then should we understand “evidence”? Does evidence mean the same thing in different contexts and constituencies?

In their new book, Rethinking Evidence in the Time of Pandemics: Scientific Vs Narrative Rationality, and Medical Knowledge Practices, Eivind Engebretsen and Mona Baker argue that we ought to adopt a more nuanced and socially responsive approach to medical expertise that incorporates scientific and lay processes of making sense of the world and how we decide to act in it. Using the narrative framework, they offer a model of analysis that sheds greater light on why different people arrive at different decisions based on the same sources of evidence and why we must acknowledge their reasons for doing so as rooted in different types of rationality rather than dismissing them as irrational.

Eivind Engebretsen is a Professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo, where he is also the Executive Chairman of the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education.

Mona Baker is Director of the Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at Shanghai International Studies University. She is also affiliated with the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education at the University of Oslo.

Host:

Professor Dan Banik, University of Oslo, Twitter: @danbanik @GlobalDevPod

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