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: