Evidence-Based Medicine: A Short History of a Modern Medical Movement

In This Era of Evidence-Based Medicine! (personal communication). For Guyatt, who had coined the term nearly 3 years earlier in a short editorial for the ACP Journal Club, the copywriter's blunt assertion proved not to be an exaggeration Over a short period, evidence-based medicine, defined as "the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients" [2], had evolved into an emblem for an entire generation, becoming synonymous with the practices of quantification and statistics that pervaded the medical milieu at the end of the twentieth century. Indeed, an era of evidence-based medicine (EBM) had been ushered in.