Some History

Evidence-based Medicine

According to an article in Wikipedia,

Although testing medical interventions for efficacy has existed for several hundred years, and arguably more, it was only in the 20th century that this effort evolved to impact almost all fields of health care and policy. Professor Archie Cochrane, a Scottish epidemiologist, through his book Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services (1972) and subsequent advocacy caused increasing acceptance of the concepts behind evidence-based practice. Cochrane's work was honoured through the naming of centres of evidence-based medical research — Cochrane Centres — and an international organisation, the Cochrane Collaboration. The explicit methodologies used to determine "best evidence" were largely established by the McMaster University research group led by David Sackett and Gordon Guyatt. The term "evidence-based medicine" first appeared in the medical literature in 1992 in a paper by Guyatt et al.

In the US, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences identified “Decision-making is evidence-based” as one of Ten Rules for Redesign of the American health care system in the policy paper Crossing the Quality Chasm: a new Health System for the 21st Century.

The evidence-based medicine movement initially generated skepticism and controversy.

The controversy over psychotherapy effectiveness

For the mental health field, there was another important historical strand deeply influencing the eventual development of EBTs: the controversy over psychotherapy effectiveness.

We’ll summarize this controversy in an update.