Evidence-Based Medicine Matters

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.