Evidence-Based Medicine Matters

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.