Evidence-Based Medicine Matters

Marc Woolfall

Research Scientist in Detergents

EBM is fundamental to progress in medicine. It is easy for people to forget just how bad life was in the past without medicine to help us: polio, smallpox, the plague, measles, mumps, etc. The use of evidence is the only way that we can tell whether something is effective or not. In medicine it is surprisingly easy to believe that treatments work even when they do not. If we don't test treatments properly we are only fooling ourselves and will never be able to improve.