Evidence-Based Medicine Matters

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.