Having mulled over the term evidence-based which means many things to many people depending on their training or lack thereof in epidemiology and actually something that goes beyond epidemiology -- program evaluation,  I think a better term for the complaint about how data is sometimes misused is that it is "compartmentalized evidence".  

This is the whole critique behind the Nutritification of foods whereby many nutritional scientists studied components of food and then forgot to look at how those components interact when they are in foods.  This is why when the World Bank did a review of evidence on interventions, some of the interventions came out looking as if they were less cost effective and less cost beneficial -- because their model could not take into account that some of the interventions conferred multiple benefits.  

My advisor at Cornell was very very insistent that before we ever made even the first attempt at designing a study, we sat and made a conceptual map of how we thought all the factors of what we were researching would interact and ALSO made a conceptual map of alternative explanations for how those factors might interact differently or respond to some other "confounding" factor.  That sort of big picture mental mapping was incredibly challenging to do well.  In the process it usually identified many of the pitfalls you would need to take into account when designing your research.  

Best regards, Susan Burger

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