Celebrating Archie Cochrane

Cochrane is named in honour of Archie Cochrane, a British medical researcher who contributed greatly to the development of epidemiology as a science. The 11th of January marks Archie Cochrane ' s birthday and it ' s a great opportunity  to reflect on his contributions.Archie Cochrane is best known for his influential book,Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services, published in 1972. The principles he set out in it so clearly were straightforward: he suggested that, because resources would always be limited, they should be used to provide equitably those forms of health care which had been shown in properly designed evaluations to be effective. In particular, he stressed the importance of using evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) because these were likely to provide much more reliable information than other sources of evidence. Cochrane ' s simple propositions were soon widely recognised as seminally important - by lay people as well as by health professionals.How can we have a rational health service if we don ’t know which of the things being done in it are useful and which are useless or possibly even harmful? — Archie CochraneIn 1979 he wrote, " It is surely a great criticism of our profession that we have not organised a critical summary, by specialty or subspecialty, adapted periodically, of all relevant randomised controlled trials. " His challenge led to the establishment during the 1980s of an international collaboration t...
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