2009-The Physician of the Future English and Catalan

F UNDACIÓN E DUCACIÓN M ÉDICA (FEM) 32 signi"cantly to increasing the quality of health care by abandoning practices lacking e'ectiveness or justi"cation but the dangers of an acritical attitude towards EBM should not be neglected. EBM has fostered blind faith in procedural guidelines and protocols that should not be used without critical adaptation a%er assessment of individual cases. If not, considering that protocols and guidelines cannot contemplate individual characteristics of a given patient, since by nature they are constructions based on statistical averages, indiscriminate use may cause inadequate practice. $e good practitioner is the one that knows when NOT to apply a certain protocol to a given patient. Secondly, EBM has praised the virtues of certain scienti"c logic at the expense of a relational component, by which physicians are in danger of perceiving their patients as subjects with standard patterns of illness to be treated in a manner that has also become standard; a scienti"c statistical approach that may have little relation to what is considered good clinical practice. It is therefore not unusual nowadays to "nd physicians that are very good at reasoning and calculating probabilities but who do not spend enough time listening to their patients.