The Importance of Evidence in Medicine

Experience is a person's biggest asset. Often in our Edaily life, our actions are dictated by the way our previous decisions panned out. With experience, we can estimate the consequences of our actions, making it easier to decide the manner in which we carry out a certain task. While two people can have similar experiences, identical experiences are hard to come across. There is always a variation in the way different people carry out their tasks, which is owed to the difference in their experiences. Therefore, while one person may be able to carry out a task perfectly, the other may make errors causing a delay in completion of the task. This is where 'science' or 'evidence' becomes crucial.

- Ashish Kumar Lamiyan and Saumya Surekha,

Science, in the simplest terms, is the systematic study of the natural world through observation and experimentation. While 'observation' is akin to the traditional 'experience' that we talk about; 'experimentation' is the part of science which makes all the difference. Experimentation is the golden tool which gives legitimacy to scientific observations. We all know that Newton discovered gravity by observation and proved it with mathematical calculations in his book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. However, it was the experiments of Henry Cavendish, carried out almost 111 years after the publication of Newton's principia that gave Newton's law of gravity unquestioned legitimacy and proof. When experience is supported with proof, evidence is born. The Oxford dictionary defines the term 'evidence' as the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or hypothesis is true or valid.

Evolution of evidence based medicine

Man has practiced medicine since time immemorial. Every major civilization has left traces of the way medicine was practiced in the olden days. While most of this knowledge was documented in ancient scripts, a lot of it was also passed on by word of mouth. Medicine men/ women would often learn things such as the adverse effects of administering some herbs or the technical difficulties of some surgeries from their predecessors, which was passed onto their successors. However, this way of spreading knowledge became unreliable and crude with the development of 'evidence based medicine'. Evidence based medicine is the practice of using available proof for making decisions for patient care.