Abstract
Epidemiology is an essential component of all public health activities that implement the organized efforts of society to promote, protect, and restore health. These comprise: clinical medicine, which deals with individual patients; prevention and early diagnosis at the population level; and empowering people to exercise responsibility for their health through adopting health-promoting habits. ‘From epidemiology to medicine, prevention, and public health’ argues that systematic reviews complemented by meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials are particularly valuable for clinical medicine, contributing to the continuously evolving body of evidence-based medicine which guides doctors' everyday practice. More generally, the quantitative and probabilistic traits of epidemiology pervade clinical medicine.
