Scientism and humanism are two main views on the development of medicine, which run through both theory and practice. Under the guidance of the modern medical concept of " bio-psycho-social”, the views of scientism and humanism on medicine have reached an unprecedented level of development and integration, which jointly determine the connotations and demands of current medicine. As one of the current mainstream medical models, evidence-based medicine (EBM) has played an important role in the management of current medical theories and practices. Meanwhile, EBM has also encompassed views of scientism and humanism in its own development and has successfully shaped the knowledge and methodological system. EBM will continue to gain insight into the characteristics of views of scientism and humanism in the future of medicine to improve itself and should pay more attention to the development of humanism view. As an important branch discipline of EBM, evidence-based Chinese medicine may become a model of the perfect combination of scientism view and humanism view.
The primary principle of evidence-based medicine is that the best clinical decision-making is derived from clinical problems with combination of patient’s preferences with clinical experience and the best evidence. Evidence-based medicine by its nature, is a specific application on the evaluation of medical hypothesis. It also emphasize the importance of humanism in clinical practice. Our study explored the scientific and humanistic characteristics of evidence-based medicine from the prospective of philosophy, so as to facilitate the extensive application of evidence based practice paradigm in other fields.