Succeeding With Evidence-Based Medicine Won't Be Easy

By Suresh Kumar

In a 2002 presentation, then Harvard Medical School Dean Joseph Martin observed that medical education lacked the discipline of quantitative sciences. He predicted that how we taught and practiced medicine would become substantially more fact-based. Later, a slide highlighting variability in different professional disciplines caught my attention (see box). It suggested that it was easier to predict the success of airline baggage handlers than for most medical disciplines.