Whole Systems Research - Reason For Founding

Reason For Founding

To some extent the WSR movement represents a reaction to the over-valuation of randomized clinical trials (RCTs). The idea is that RCTs have grown in a symbiotic fashion with the development of pharmaceutical medicine, to the point that they are almost exclusively appropriate for testing drugs or drug-like interventions for mass prescription in large health-care systems. One reason for founding WSR was a feeling that the search for specific remedies having specific effects in RCTs makes little sense in much of current CAM research. WSR does not take the position that RCTs are useless, but that they are over-used, and have significant shortcomings, especially for CAM.