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

If you should poll students and scholars of medical history about the most important developments of modern health care, you would find something called Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) will be very high up on the list. That is the delivery and choices of medical treatments based on sound evidence. Based on scientific evaluation. Based on firm unbiased evaluation such as in double-blind clinical trials and ones that include placebo groups. Now, this seems logical to any of the medical students, ophthalmology residents and retinal fellows I teach about genetics, molecular biology and research in this century.  Yet persons in the late 1980s were often still under the care of medical doctors whose choices of treatments were not necessarily sound options based on unbiased evaluation of the evidence. This is a slight update of my posting in 2019, inspired by the fact that the current federal administration of my country is throwing out Evidence Based Medicine as applied to protecting the health of persons in the United States. 

Yes, over 20 years after humans first walked on the Moon, medical schools and the bodies that license physicians were promoting practices that had often evolved on their own over decades with some backed up by scientific examination but many that were not. Fortunately for us now, an American doctor moved to Canada in the 1960s just as universal healthcare was started nationwide and he realized that was the climate to established principals now considered essential to the teaching and practice of medicine. Evidence-Based Medicine. Who was this American who made Canada his home? Now in 2025 politicians are throwing science out the window. The outcomes will not be good for our public health.

mRNA Vaccines: what the 1st Trump administration did correct and is now putting in jeopardy in 2025.

Updated 9-4-2025 

As a biochemistry professional, I have followed the science of COVID-19 before most people had heard about it, before it was reported outside of China. Along the way from the pandemic start, through vaccine development, the overwhelming of hospitals, and the arrival of the first COVID-19 vaccines, I have read and listened to politicians and some scientists argue that natural immunity would be good enough. The idea is that you should just let the disease spread and natural immunity will build up. Well, yes that is true, if you survive a viral infection you will most likely have some immunity for some time. The problem with their suggestion however is the survival part and the cost of herd natural immunity. That cost is permanent damage and increased personal risk of future death from MACE. Fortunately, the first Trump administration decided to go with the strategy of "Warp Speed" to get vaccines developed faster than at any time in history. Read on for some explanation about this and learn how MACE can kill you.

Walking the DOGE? They may leave a mess for you: a government purse with no watchdogs and lack of medical research.

Back in February I wrote this post and have updated it today as we start the Fall term and I just taught the first class of Science of Vision to a collection of our young future bioscience colleagues. Both undergraduate and graduate students. In February, you were told that government workers are criminals and frauds, and that biomedical scientists like me are ripping us off. Despite that rhetoric, after 6 months there has not been any evidence presented at all to show where the fraud is or what the fraud is. Why? Because its really hard to cheat with government funds without getting caught and stopped. At least it used to be before all the Inspector Generals of the US Government were closed down. Now the US House is considering slashing the NIH budget by 40%. As I am a scientist, I am writing this to tell you all about the science of how federal research grants work in the United States, and why activities like potential new medical treatment development will simply stop if we chop away the indirect cost components of grants and slash the NIH budget. Here explained with examples:

Human Guinea Pigs, the people paid to safety test potential new drugs are not really volunteers without pressure.

The first testing of a drug to be approved in Canada, or in the US by the FDA, or for the EU's drug agency, requires giving the drug at various doses to healthy persons. We often are taught that these are very much volunteers, who participate for only good reasons. 

If there are bad side effects or even dangerous consequences to new drugs, then these factors must be known or clinical trials on sick persons might cause great harm. Yet, we seem to experience the removal of some drugs from the market long after their approved use causes some severe adverse effects. The adverse effects signal tends to take a couple of years or more before it becomes apparent that the drug should never have been approved because of its severe side effects. How can this be missed in Phase-I? This is how.

Solar Eclipse Safely, from a Vision Scientist.

 Now we are post-eclipse. If you or anyone you know is noticing a new difficulty reading with their central vision today (Wednesday, two days after the eclipse), and they spent some time watching the solar eclipse without solar safety glasses, then it's time to visit an optometrist or ophthalmologist for a retinal exam. 

You can learn about how and why the light from the Sun can burn or damage the very important photoreceptor cells in your retina here where I was interviewed by Rachelle Graham of CBS News Detroit. 

What does a Sun burned retina look like? 

The picture below is from an article you can read from The Foundation, American Society of Retinal Specialists on eclipse damage to retinas.

As you can see (left) , the top panel is a view of the patient's retina as observed directly from looking into the front of the eye. The lower panel is a an OCT image that shows the layers of the neural retina in cross section. OCT stands for Optical Coherence Tomography, and it is a way to use back-scattered light to see the layers of the retina. Obviously a very useful imaging system for your eye doctor. The green line on the top panel shows the location of the OCT scan. 

I have added the red arrow, pointing to the OCT image cross-section at the fovea from this patient with a fovea burn. This area is the part of the retina that you are reading this with now, your central, high-detailed, vision. That white stalk of burn damage should not be there. A normal undamaged human fovea does not have that burn feature, as seen in this normal retinal OCT scan below.

 OCT image of a normal fovea from "The ABCs of OCT" in the Review of Optometry.

So I hope that you were able to watch the Solar Eclipse of April 8th 2024 in a safe manner. My best advice for your vision health at any time is get an eye check-up at least every two years when younger and over 30 years of age it is best to get an eye exam once per year. If you have diabetes or heart disease then you want an eye exam every year regardless of your age. The reality is that most damage to your retina occurs without any sensation or pain, so many conditions affecting your retinas will be detected by your eye exam and catching retinal conditions early is important for possible treatment. Once photoreceptor cells have died, there is nothing currently that modern medicine can do to fix that.

Ken Mitton

How to Watch the Solar Eclipse Safely, from a Vision Scientist.

I wrote about this during the last eclipse in 2017, now its time to update for this April 2024. How can you watch the solar eclipse without harming your eyes? What is so scary about a solar eclipse? Are there some special rays of light that only occur during the eclipse that make the Sun dangerous to our retinas? Actually, the answer to the last question is, no. So why is it dangerous to look at the eclipse with the naked eye? Read on for the answers.