I came across a post on a Swedish primary doctor Facebook page that mentioned a word I didn’t know existed. Eminence Based Medicine, at least according to some, is when there is no evidence to base your treatment plan on and you instead choose to trust experts. I guess in some cases, if we’re high enough or long enough into our careers, we might even venture to assume on our own what the best course of action is. “Expert opinion” is often used these days, but it doesn’t have the aura of eminence…
Intrigued by the expression itself, I started researching how new Eminence Based Medicine is, since it was all new to me. I found to my surprise that it was coined by Isaacs and Fitzgerald in 1999. They wrote:
Clinical decisions should, as far as possible, be evidence based. So runs the current clinical dogma. We are urged to lump all the relevant randomised controlled trials into one giant meta-analysis and come out with a combined odds ratio for all decisions. Physicians, surgeons, nurses are doing it; soon even the lawyers will be using evidence based practice. But what if there is no evidence on which to base a clinical decision?
They introduced a bunch of other terms in the same vein as Eminence Based. Some were more comical than others. So here is a table from that 1999 article:
A Country Doctor Writes: 
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