Ethics and evidence-based medicine

To the Editor: We consider that Leeder and Rychetnik make several mistakes in their exploration of the relationships between ethics and evidence-based medicine (EBM).1 We share some of their ethical concerns about the determinants of the research agenda — lack of consumer input, emphasis on the benefits of interventions rather than harms, and funding structures favouring commercially promising interventions or biased by the status of the methodology to be used. However, these are criticisms that relate to producing new research, not using available research.