Helen Pearson: What Constitutes Real Medical Evidence?

About this episode

Helen Pearson discusses the evolution of medical evidence and its implications in healthcare.

Helen Pearson, PhD, is an award-winning biomedical journalist at Nature, named European Science Journalist of the Year in 2025. She teaches science writing at University College London. BEYOND BELIEF is her second, just published book. THE LIFE PROJECT was her first. The points we covered include: —The evolution of evidence over 8 decades, moving from rationalism, expert opinion, hunches (eminence-based) to empiricism, evidence-based —The enormous devastating adverse impact of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care book from a single sentence change, leading to an epidemic of sudden infant death syndrome. And how it ultimately got corrected. —The term evidence-based medicine was coined in 1991 at McMaster University —Iain Chalmers, Archie Cochrane and the Cochrane Collaboration “The scandalous failure of science to cumulate evidence scientifically”—Iain Chalmers —Systematic reviews —Natural experiments (such as with Shingles) —Resistance to change “Challenging a doctor’s conventional way of practice is like hitting him in the intellectual testicles”—Drummond Rennie, past JAMA editor —Evidence-based practice (and not) in the Covid pandemic —Recent examples of challenging dogma (kindly…

People in this episode

Host: Eric Topol

Guest: Helen Pearson

Topics covered

• medical evidence
• evidence-based medicine
• biomedical journalism
• systematic reviews
• impact of literature on health
• AI and misinformation

Keywords

• evidence-based medicine
• biomedical journalism
• systematic reviews
• Covid pandemic
• AI misinformation

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Nature, University College London, Cochrane Collaboration

Books & works: BEYOND BELIEF, THE LIFE PROJECT

Places: McMaster University, Covid

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