History
Traces of evidence-based medicine's origin can be found in ancient Greece. Although testing medical interventions for efficacy has existed since the time of Avicenna's The Canon of Medicine in the 11th century, it was only in the 20th century that this effort evolved to impact almost all fields of health care and policy. Professor Archie Cochrane, a Scottish epidemiologist, through his book Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services (1972) and subsequent advocacy, caused increasing acceptance of the concepts behind evidence-based practice.
Cochrane's work was honoured through the naming of centres of evidence-based medical research — Cochrane Centres — and an international organization, the Cochrane Collaboration. The explicit methodologies used to determine "best evidence" were largely established by the McMaster University research group led by David Sackett and Gordon Guyatt. Guyatt later coined the term “evidence-based” in 1990. The term "evidence-based medicine" first appeared in the medical literature in 1992 in a paper by Guyatt et al. Relevant journals include the British Medical Journal's Clinical Evidence, the Journal Of Evidence-Based Healthcare and Evidence Based Health Policy. All of these were co-founded by Anna Donald, an Australian pioneer in the discipline.
Read more about this topic: Evidence-based Medicine
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)