A 1955 clinical trial report that changed my career

Evidence-Based Medicine—An Oral History

“…It forever changed my attitude toward conventional wisdom, uncovered my latent iconoclasm, and inaugurated my career in what I later labeled 'clinical epidemiology.'" 5 The rigorous approach taken by Tom Chalmers toward randomized trials and his early adoption of meta-analysis were key to the development of these tools of evidence. Alvan Feinstein, a clinician and researcher at Yale who died in 2001 at age 75, was important in defining clinical epidemiology and in first showing how medical practice could be studied.…”

Evidence-based policymaking: promise, challenges and opportunities for accounting and financial markets research

“…Evidence-based medicine is closely related to clinical epidemiology and in this sense the methods were not new and it has much older roots (Claridge and Fabian 2005). For instance, 'the father of evidence-based medicine' David Sackett acknowledges that he was inspired by the work of Thomas Chalmers (Sackett 2010). 37.…”

Why did I become a clinician-trialist?

“…That report of a (factorial) randomised trial challenging the validity of two standard treatments for hepatitis -bed rest and low fat diet -helped to change my career. 4 During my postgraduate training in internal medicine, the better I became at diagnosing my patients' illnesses, the more frustrated I became at my profession's collective ignorance about how I should treat them, or whether I should treat them at all. I came to the conclusion that there were four things wrong with the way that the experts were using their clinical observations to decide whether a treatment did more good than harm.…”