In 1959, a young doctor named David Sackett stumbled on a clinical trial that would change his life – and most of ours. The study showed that conventional wisdom on bed rest in medicine was wrong. And it helped lead Sackett and others to develop evidence-based medicine, in which doctors today make decisions based on rigorous scientific research.
It was a necessary corrective. The history of medicine is littered with practices once assumed to work but which were later shown by research to be useless or harmful – as I discovered in the five years it took me to research my book, Beyond Belief: How Evidence Shows What Really Works.
