Evidence Based Medicine is Less than 50 years old: born in Hamilton Ontario from an American doctor who made Canada home.

This is an update of an article I first published in 2019, inspired in 2025 and 2026 by attempts of the current federal administration of my country to ignore Evidence Based Medicine. In 2026, several American medical associations have stepped in to provide science-based vaccination guidance to families as the secretary of HHS and the White House itself are announcing changes to guidance that are not founded in biomedical research data.  This is a enough problem for American's medical health that six former Surgeons General of the United States actually published an editorial in the Washington Post (October 2025) warning Americans of the danger this poses to their future health. (See Six Surgeons General: It's our duty to warn the nation about JFK Jr., October 7, 2025). Every Fall, I teach premedical, medical and graduate students about EBM, short for Evidence Based Medicine. How long have we been using Evidence Based Medicine across medical training in the United States and Canada? You may or may not be surprised about the answer, but we benefit from EBM, a concept that was helped along by a humble and now famous American physician and educator, Dr. David Sackett MD.