CLINICAL AND POPULATION EPIDEMIOLOGY: BEYOND SIBLING RIVALRY?

Twenty years ago, the American Journal of Epidemiology published David Sackett's brief description of. clinical epidemiology and its practitioners [1]. This commentary was a useful focal point for an emerging discipline. By 1983, with clinical epidemiology already thriving in many academic medical centres, Walter Holland called into question both the term, 'clinical epidemiology', and the nature of the discipline [2]. More recently, clinical epidemiology has drawn strong criticism from John Last, a noted academician whose contributions include the editorship of the Maxcy-Rosenau Textbook of Public Health. Writing in the Journal of Public Health Policy in 1988 [3], Last referred to the 'uncritical enthusiasm' for clinical epidemiology in medical schools as 'a danger to health', and staked. a claim to the term 'epidemiology' as appropriate only to the description of what classical or population epidemiologists do. Faced with such views, practitioners and proponents of clinical epidemiology can respond in three ways. They can ignore the criticism, and go on about their business. They can reaffirm their differences and resort to defensive rhetoric. Or, the critique can become an opportunity for reflection about the nature of clinical epidemiology and its relations with sister disciplines in modem medical schools. The latter course is followed here by four physicians who-despite diverse backgrounds and interests-all consider their work to be in the field of clinical epidemiology.