David Sackett, OC, MD, FRSC, FRCP

Professor Emeritus, Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON

"for his leadership in the fields of clinical epidemiology and evidence-based medicine, which have had major impacts internationally in applied clinical research and in the practice of medicine

 2009 Gairdner Wightman Award

After training in internal medicine, nephrology and epidemiology, David Sackett coined the term "clinical epidemiology" and began his first career (age 32) as the founding Chair of Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics at McMaster University's new medical school.   In his second career he began to design, execute, interpret, monitor, write and teach about randomized clinical trials, an activity that continues to the present, some 200 trials later.  His third career was dedicated to developing and disseminating "critical appraisal" strategies for busy clinicians, and ended when he decided he was out of date clinically and returned (at age 49) to a two-year "retreading" residency in Hospitalist Internal Medicine.  His fifth and sixth careers were largely clinical, as Physician-in-Chief at Chedoke-McMaster Hospitals, and as Head of the Division of General Internal Medicine for the Hamilton region.   In 1994 a chair was created for him at the University of Oxford, where he took up his seventh career as foundation Director of the NHS R&D Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, Consultant on the Medical Service at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Foundation Chair of the Cochrane Collaboration Steering Group, and Foundation Co-Editor of Evidence-Based Medicine.  Retired from clinical practice in 1999, he began his eighth career by returning to Canada and setting up the Trout Research & Education Centre, where he reads, researches, writes and teaches about randomized clinical trials.  Along the way, he has published 10 books, chapters for about 50 others, and about 300 papers in medical and scientific journals. 

Among his more important randomized clinical trials, and in collaboration with colleagues around the world, he was a Principal Investigator in the trials that showed, for the first time anywhere, the life-saving benefits of aspirin for patients with threatened stroke and threatened heart attack, that surgically repairing the "hardened" arteries of patients with threatened stroke (carotid endarterectomy) prevented both stroke and death, and the ability of nurse practitioners to provide effective, high-quality primary care.  In addition, his "debunking" trials have shown the futility of traditional health education in helping hypertensive patients take their medicine, and that a popular "bypass" operation for stroke-prone individuals did more harm than good.