Evidence-Based Medicine Matters

Ross W Sargent

I find it very sobering to reflect that at any other time in human history I would have been dead by the age of fifteen, a victim of Crohn's Disease. It is also very likely I could have died at an even earlier age but for vaccination against diseases which had been childhood killers for centuries. It is evidence-based medicine that has made this possible and nothing else. All the "ancient" medical systems that were all we had for thousands of years would have been worthless to me and yet we have people today peddling Ayurvedic medicine or acupuncture who never tire of saying how old these treatments are, as if this in some way proved their efficacy. At heart most so-called Complementary Alternative Medicine, no matter how dressed up in pseudoscience, is only Vitalism - the old belief that some kind of spirit or energy animates living matter and that by enabling or unblocking such energies one can influence a patient's health. Alternative treatments, whether homeopathy or Chinese "Traditional" medicine or Hopi ear-candling should meet the same standards expected for conventional treatments - if they don't they should not be called medicine, even when qualified by such weasel words as alternative, complementary or traditional.