Thank you very much Trish for posting the link to the article. I enjoyed reading it!
Before prescribing a drug to a patient, I always want to be aware of its effects and side effects. Evidence based medicine provides us with the clinical evidence of these effects.
In EBM, practitioners can rely on nationwide guidelines that have been set by experts from all over the world. These guidelines are based on the results of randomised controlled trials, systematic reviews and meta-analysis.
Rosenberg et Donald describe evidence based medicine as “the process of systematically finding, appraising, and using contemporaneous research findings as the basis for clinical decisions” (Rosenberg et Donald, 1995).
In the article Trish posted, there are two good examples of health improvements through EBM:
Venesection (bleeding) had been a treatment option for many diseases over hundreds of years. Only in the 1820s Pierre Louis compared the clinical outcomes of patients treated with venesections and without. He could prove that venesections actually worsened patients’ health status. Only because of his findings venesection therapies stopped.
In the 1960s Richard Doll ran one of the first RCTs. He showed that streptomycine could treat tuberculosis (TB). How would we treat TB today if there were no RCTs and EBM?