Discipline Construction of Clinical Epidemiology and Evidence-based Medicine:What, Who, Where, and Whither?

Clinical Epidemiology (CE) is an essential course of medicine that involves the application of methods established by Modern Epidemiology and Statistics to investigate the etiology, prophylaxis, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of diseases-inflicted subjects from individuals to populations. Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) requires healthcare providers to make shared-decisions for the patient's best interest through extensively searching, explicitly appraising, and judiciously applying evidence in the light of the physician's expertise and the patient's values and preferences. David Sackett, who is from McMaster University, and his successor, Gordon Guyatt, have become the iconic figures of founding, improving and spreading CE/EBM globally. In 1980s David Sackett tutored the first generation of physician-methodologists from China, and they, in turn, introduced the core concepts of CE, i.e., the design, measurement and evaluation of clinical research, into their own homeland. Thanks to their effort, China embraced EBM in parallel with the world in the 1990s. Over the past three decades, we have witnessed the infancy, childhood, adolescence, and mature adulthood of CE and EBM in China and have benefited tremendously from therein. Today, the task to strengthen CE and EBM in China becomes even imminent in the era of building Healthy China.