Forcing the spring towards a new era in evidence-based medicine

“But, by the words we speak and the faces we show the world, we force the spring.”

The beginning of Bill Clinton’s first inaugural address seems an odd place to start a discussion about epidemiology, I admit. For us, though, it reflects the developments over the past few months that have changed how evidence-based medicine is practiced, and how it’s going to look in the near future. And we’re excited about all of it.

It’s no secret that there is massive pressure on drug companies to fundamentally change how they operate. This push for a new era of accountability is due to the efforts of many people, including Ben Goldacre, whose Bad Pharma has become an international phenomenon, and Tom Jefferson and Peter Doshi, whose campaign to obtain all the data on Tamiflu has been a major driver towards exposing withheld data. The current state of pharmaceutical research is a little like when you were in school doing an experiment, and something didn’t quite turn out right, and you ‘forgot’ to write down the results for that one part of the experiment. It may have worked in high school, when the worst that could happen is that you would have to stay after class. But when billions of pounds and thousands of lives are at stake, the stakes are quite different.

The All Trials campaign- an online petition that’s rapidly gaining publicity and support- now has over 80000 signatures, including major medical journals (our EvidenceLive partner, the BMJ, is one of the instigators of the campaign).

The philosopher Thomas Kuhn suggested that the history of scientific progress has been one of paradigm shifts, in which research continues along in a certain paradigm until someone comes along to break out and move on to another radically different way of looking at phenomena. We can’t help but wonder if we are in the midst of a paradigm shift in healthcare- one that values transparency, scientific progress, and responsibility to patients above all else. If you haven’t already signed up, come to EvidenceLive, and help “force the spring” towards a new era in evidence-based medicine.

First Posted on 17th February 2013 by Braden O’Neill