The Epidemiological Interface of Gnostic Clinical Research

Abstract

Alvan Feinstein and David Sackett pioneered the now-common tenet that active following and critical evaluation of reports from directly practice-relevant clinical research are integral parts of modern practice of clinical medicine. For this conception of the relation of clinical practice to clinical research – quite questionable – together with their conception of the essence of epidemiology – mistaken – Feinstein and Sackett adopted the term ‘clinical epidemiology’ – a contradiction in terms. Feinstein was very hesitant about accepting this term – exogenous to him – for the statistical-type clinical research he was concerned with (and called clinimetrics); and he didn’t attempt to define the concept. We here, apart from describing the genesis of and thinking about this contemporary version of ‘clinical epidemiology,’ outline the actual nature of the interface of gnostic clinical research with epidemiology, which implies that gnostic clinical research is neither epidemiology nor epidemiological research – but: meta-epidemiological clinical research.