Evidence Based Medicine, Meet Evidence Based Causation

The concept of Evidence Based Medicine has certainly been gaining ground in the workers’ compensation universe in recent years. The adaptation has not been easy, and certainly the concept still has its opponents. Yet, the question was recently posed to me; If we now use Evidence Based Medicine, why can we not adopt Evidence Based Causation? Getting this idea into the mainstream of discussion is a mission of William Zachry, former VP of Risk Management at Safeway/Albertsons and now Senior Fellow at the Sedgwick Institute. We discussed it at last month’s annual conference of the California Coalition on Workers’ Compensation (CCWC). His premise is pretty simple; if we can base medicine on “reasonable use of modern best medicine,” why can we not determine causation on similarly sound principles?