Something I’ve been wanting to share for a while is the idea that evidence-based medicine no longer fully matches the reality of how disease shows up in people’s lives.

To be clear, evidence-based medicine is essential. It is the reason we’ve made extraordinary advances. It’s why we save lives and why modern healthcare works at all. And it is of the utmost importance in a field like integrative medicine, where we are often exploring therapies once labeled “alternative.”

But over time, something subtle has happened.

Rigor has slowly turned into reductionism. Statistical significance has begun to stand in for clinical meaning. Guidelines are often treated as infallible rather than evidence-informed. And complex, system-level disease is being forced into models that no longer fit.

Many clinicians feel this tension every day, between what the data says, what the guidelines allow, and what the patient in front of us actually needs. Patients, too, often leave our system dissatisfied, sensing that root causes remain unexplored and answers feel incomplete.

I recorded a new episode of The Trip Lab to explore this more deeply.

Not to reject evidence, but to reclaim it.
Not to abandon rigor, but to restore clinical wisdom alongside it.

In this episode, I talk about:

Why statistically significant does not always mean clinically meaningful
How reductionism crept into evidence-based medicine, even with good intentions
Why so many patients feel unwell despite “normal” labs
And a few ideas for how medicine might evolve, from research design to clinical judgment, if we’re willing to stay curious a little longer

The name of my podcast, The Trip Lab, nods to psychedelics, yes. But a trip, psychedelic or otherwise, is really an exploration. A willingness to step outside familiar frameworks, question what we think we know, and notice connections that were not obvious before.

That’s what this episode is meant to be.