What else is Evidence-based Medicine?

The practice of evidence-based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence. Strange enough, scientific discussion focuses on external evidence from systematic research, but neglects its counterpart, i.e., individual clinical expertise. Apart from a lack of appropriate intellectual tools for approaching the latter, this might be due to the mutual concealment of thought and action, of sensor and motor activity (Viktor von Weizsaecker's principle of the revol-ving door). Behind this, and incommensurably different from each other, lie the world of physics and the world of biology with an ego animal, that is, the dilemma of the self-conscious subject in a world of objects. When practicing medicine, this dilemma of self-reference is being resolved but only through a holistic approach combining rational and external evidence with biographical, spiritual, emotional and pre-rational elements represented in the physician's individual clinical expertise.