Does Case Management Work? The Evidence and the Abuse of Evidence-Based Medicine

On the evidence, assertive community treatment case management is one of the most effective interventions in psychiatry today. Despite improving the evidence base for practice (e.g. as has occurred for case-management in psychiatry), evidence-based medicine (EBM) is still susceptible to compromise and misrepresentation, due to unexamined or undeclared bias. Unless this potential for abuse is recognized and checked, EBM in psychiatry is in danger of being discredited at the hand of some of its own proponents. There is a need for more rigorous pursuit of evidence-based psychiatry, including more systematic declaration of bias in all research, whether quantitative or qualitative in design.