Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve

Trustee, Sense About Science

None of us wants to take medicine that will do no good - and may even cause harm. That is a really good reason for supporting clinical trials of new medicines, and for making evidence gained from those trials (the negative as well as the positive results!) public. And it's a really good reason not to rely on remedies which are not known to work. I'm glad that NICE (The National Institute for Clinical Excellence) provides independent guidance to medical professionals on what works and what does not.

Ellen Raphael

Director UK, Sense About Science

Looking at all these accounts, you realise how little time and attention is given to explaining what evidence-based medicine actually is. And while the scientists who have contributed are united in seeing the importance of remaking the public case for it 40 years on, there are many different views about what the challenges of the next forty years are. There is serious concern for example about over-regulation in clinical trials but also about a number of different therapy areas that still escape the scrutiny of rigorous testing.

Leonor Sierra

Scientific Liaison, Sense About Science

Part of my family comes from a village in rural Spain, and in my grandparents’ generation and great-grandparents’ women would die in childbirth and polio would ravage the area. Even people in my mother’s generation suffered from it. Now polio is completely eradicated and women can be well attended to in a nearby hospital. Things have changed a lot in fifty years. Ask my younger cousins and they might not have even heard of polio! We wouldn’t have the vaccine that has made that possible without evidence-based medicine and though childbirth might still be a bit daunting for some of us young women, it’s not because we’re thinking that we will be dying in the process.

Lord Taverne

Chair, Sense About Science

I can’t improve on Sherlock Holmes: 'I had,' said he, 'come to an entirely erroneous conclusion, which shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data'.

Nick Ross

Trustee, Sense About Science

Doctors through history have probably killed more people than they saved. Faith in Galenic, Chinese and other primitive theories led to frontline treatments being poisoning, forced vomiting and bleeding. Only since the advent of scientific medicine has life expectancy leaped forward. With the advent of powerful new drugs and other therapies medicine will always be a dangerous business – so it must always be applied with evidential rigour. Those who would drag us back to the dark ages will, like physicians in pre-Enlightenment times, have blood on their hands.

Dr Simon Singh

Trustee, Sense About Science

When the BMJ ran a poll to find the greatest medical breakthrough, evidence-based medicine received only half as many votes as antibiotics and vaccines, but in my opinion evidence-based medicine should have been top of the poll. Antibiotics and vaccines are obvious lifesavers, but we would not know about their effectiveness and how to best employ them if it were not for evidence-based medicine. Evidence-based medicine might not sound very glamorous, but it underpins the whole of modern medicine, telling us what works and what does not, and separating the safe from dangerous.