Dr Alexander Burnfield

Trustee, The Multiple Sclerosis Trust

Medicine which is not evidence based is just a wish-fulfilling fantasy. In my experience of having multiple sclerosis (MS) myself and meeting others with the illness, people with MS and their relatives quite often believe someone somewhere MUST have the cure or treatment - and therefore they conclude doctors and scientists are withholding the information they crave. Coming to terms with a diagnosis like MS is a process that takes time and understanding - denial is inevitably a part of that. Some people take advantage of people with MS and their relatives and make therapeutic claims which are appealing but unsubstantiated, exploiting the vulnerability of the emotionally fragile newly diagnosed, and the guilt of their relatives. The situation is often exploited financially by these "quacks" - some medically qualified to the shame of our medical profession. Education, sensitivity and accurate information can go a long way to combating the deceivers, but I contend that such deceivers should be be dealt with severely by the justice system. There is nothing more despicable than taking advantage of vulnerable people when they are down, without support and lacking evidence based information or hope.

Dr Caroline Wright

PHG Foundation

When I first heard the phrase 'evidence based medicine', I was immediately struck by the seemingly strange concept that there was any other kind of medicine! Surely good medical practice has to be based on evidence, otherwise it is no better than hearsay. Proof of the clinical validity and utility of a particular diagnostic test, or therapeutic intervention, is absolutely essential to sort the effective from the ineffective, the safe from the unsafe, and ultimately allows us to make informed decisions about our own health.

Dr Kieran Breen

Director of Research, Parkinson's Disease Society

Evidence-based medicine should provide the foundations for high quality health care and services. All potential treatments for Parkinson’s must be proven as truly safe and effective by rigorous testing in clinical trials, before being prescribed by doctors.

The Parkinson’s Disease Society is committed to encouraging the use of evidence-based medicine into the clinic, encouraging healthcare professionals to use scientific evidence to provide patients with the best possible care. It can be tempting to believe personal stories of miracle cures, but only by using tried and tested methods can we move forward and provide people with Parkinson’s with the best available treatments.

Dr Laura Bell

Multiple Sclerosis Society

Unfortunately clinical trials are a long and laborious process. However this is necessary to ensure that medicines are safe, better than what is already available and that potential side effects are identified and monitored. It is precisely because trials are thorough and long term that the results are useful. Anyone can claim to have a treatment for MS - why should they be believed without any proof?

Pamela Goldberg

Chief Executive, Breast Cancer Campaign

Without evidence-based medicine, treatment for breast cancer would be stuck in the dark ages as all women with the disease would be still be having mastectomies; breast conserving surgery resulted when the evidence showed that for many women with breast cancer the removal of the cancerous lump and adjuvant therapy was as good as the removal of the whole breast. Until the evidence showed that the removal of a small number of “sentinel” lymph nodes under the arm was a reliable indicator of whether breast cancer had spread, many women were having all their lymph nodes removed, impacting their quality of life.

Breast Cancer Campaign’s History of breast cancer covers these and other evidence-based advances which have led to improved survival for women with breast cancer. Click here to download the document (pdf).

Professor Peter Weissberg

Medical Director, British Heart Foundation

As a cardiologist it worries me that so many people are reluctant to take treatments that have been shown beyond doubt to improve the prognosis for heart disease. Conversely, many people think nothing of consuming 'natural' products for which there isn't a shred of evidence to show benefit or - more importantly - that they do no harm. It's thanks partly to the advances in treatment from evidence based medicine that premature deaths from heart disease have been falling steadily since the 1970s, and the BHF is proud of the role that we've played in funding the quest for evidence on which some of today's life-saving treatments are based.

Sir Tim Hunt

Principal Scientist, Cancer Research UK

When I first moved from Cambridge to the ICRF, I encountered discussion of various anti-cancer therapies for the first time. In one such group meeting, a possible antibody therapy was being discussed and in my ignorance, I enquired what the appropriate controls were for such studies. “We’ll be using historical controls” came the answer, which puzzled me because I hadn’t previously heard the term. So I asked what ‘historical controls’ were, and got the answer that they were what you thought would have happened if you hadn’t used the antibodies under discussion. “So, in other words, you don’t do any controls?” I asked. This was provocative, and they asked me in turn whether my experiments always had controls, to which I replied that in my experiments, most of the reactions were controls, and very few were the experiment. The controls serve to make sure the experiment is working properly, and without them, it’s very hard to be sure of the result. Though later we became friends, this made me an unintended enemy for quite some time.

My favorite example of an important control experiment was performed early on in the development of penicillin by Ernest Chain. The Oxford group led by Howard Florey had learned how to grow up the penicillin mould and extract the active penicillin from the culture medium, and had accumulated about a gram of the stuff. One evening, Chain injected the whole of this precious material into two normal, healthy mice. Florey was furious when he was told, regarding this as a terrible waste. But the mice lived without any ill effects, and from then on, Chain knew that penicillin harmed bacteria, and not mice. The rest is history. I am with Chain.