Importance of Scientific Method in Modern Medicine

The scientific method has been used in medicine in developing different discoveries. Development of polio vaccine in 1992 by Jonas Salk, DNA structure discovery in 1953 and human genome first draft completion in the 21st century are concrete examples of the importance of science in modern medicine (Venter et al. This essay will discuss the importance of incorporating scientific method in the current prescription. Scientists make a set of observation, formulate a hypothesis for explaining the observations and then develop experiments and methods to test the hypothesis. They further evaluate and analyze the data from the experiment to either validate or refute the hypothesis and then they generate a new or expanded hypothesis to try enhancing our understanding of the research (Ketokivi et al.

Medical schools’ incorporation of the scientific methods in their research, will help the students through the integration of the basic knowledge with clinical decision making and ultimately enhancing the patient care in the hospitals. Abraham Flexner in his report in 1910, discussed the need for incorporation of scientific knowledge in the modern medical schools. He argued that involvement of the primary scientific instructions in the schools will help the future generation of physicians in overcoming the challenges in the modern medicine thus giving them the opportunity to make an impact in human health and gradually improve their understanding of human biology and diseases (Hudson et al. Scientific method use in medicine is essential in clinical decision making and medical research. The scientific method is understood to be a logical process, and when practiced consciously and explicitly, it allows the physicians to come up with the evidence-based decision which is free of personal habits thus introducing scientific objectivity into clinical decision making.