EBM and risk: rhetorical resources in the articulation of professional identity

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) has become a major theme within health care. This has fuelled a significant debate about its role in reducing risk and its possible impact on professional autonomy. Challenges arguments that propose that EBM is a threat to professional power and status by looking at how evidence, risk and professional knowledge come to have meaning. The objective is to deconstruct all three as discursive constructions whose meanings are malleable and embedded in social and power relations. By drawing on sociological debates about the social construction of evidence, risk and professional autonomy indicates the ways in which EBM is neither a rational alternative to the seemingly unending risks of contemporary medicine, nor in opposition to professional status. Instead it concludes by arguing that EBM and notions of risk are rhetorical resources in the articulation of professional autonomy and identity.