Читать книгу Evidence in Medicine - Iain K. Crombie - Страница 7

The development of modern medicine has rightly been described as ‘the greatest benefit to mankind’ [1]. Vaccination, anaesthetics, aseptic surgery, antibiotics, insulin for diabetes and drugs to prevent and treat heart disease form part of a very long list of treatments that have transformed healthcare. These are the fruits of many years of careful clinical investigation supported by extensive research. However, medicine has a checkered history in which ineffective treatments were widely used: as Benjamin Franklin pithily remarked in the eighteenth century, ‘God heals, and the doctor takes the fees’ [2]. Studies of the history of medicine show that the basis on which treatments have been used has varied greatly across the centuries [3]. This chapter explores the rationale behind the use of treatments, and the way this has changed over time. It concludes by describing the progress towards present‐day methods for testing the effectiveness of treatments.