 Evidence-based medicine prizes certain types of biomedical evidence—highly controlled and systematic evidence—more highly than others. But that preference is a matter of much contention. As noted above, experimental evidence from a randomized experiment testing a treatment (a “randomized control trial”) is held as the best sort of evidence: the gold standard. The one exception is that “meta-analyses” of multiple experimental studies are perhaps a platinum standard better than gold (Stegenga 2011), i.e., the thinking goes that the only evidence that might be better than such experimental data is a rigorous quantitative study rigorously looking for patterns and lessons by analyzing the results many rigorous experimental studies. While the rigidity of EBM thinking gets a great deal of criticism, there are elements of the EBM’s philosophy that implement the sort of pragmatism that many critics desire, such as an epistemic openness in the community to engage in “open-ended critical inquiry” (Goldenberg 2009).