I just want to link to an article by Peter Kramer, published today in the NY Times:
Why Doctors Need Stories
It's about the role of the case vignette, and how it shouldn't be discounted in the face of evidence based medicine. It also reflects my personal opinion about the significant limits of CBT, despite all its hype.
I submitted this comment:
As a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, I applaud Dr. Kramer's embrace of "the story". But I don't think case vignettes need to be limited to the role of adjunct to evidence based medicine. Case vignettes actually do supply statistical evidence. A research group from the University of Ghent, in Belgium, specializes in Meta-Synthesis (as opposed to meta-analysis), in which they mine the data generated by a large collection of single case vignettes. You can check out their website: singlecasearchive.com, where you can search for different parameters within papers that have already been published.
You may recall my mention of this topic in a post from last January, The Rest of the Meeting. Feel free to recommend my comment (under the name, Physician NYC-not sure how that happened) from 2:14pm on Sunday the 19th.