Why Almost Everything You Hear About Medicine Is Wrong

[BridgeTheGap]

If you follow the news about health research, you risk whiplash. First garlic lowers bad cholesterol, then—after more study—it doesn’t. Hormone replacement reduces the risk of heart disease in postmenopausal women, until a huge study finds that it doesn’t (and that it raises the risk of breast cancer to boot). Eating a big breakfast cuts your total daily calories, or not—as a study released last week finds. Yet even if biomedical research can be a fickle guide, we rely on it.

But what if wrong answers aren’t the exception but the rule? More and more scholars who scrutinize health research are now making that claim. It isn’t just an individual study here and there that’s flawed, they charge. Instead, the very framework of medical investigation may be off-kilter, leading time and again to findings that are at best unproved and at worst dangerously wrong. The result is a system that leads patients and physicians astray—spurring often costly regimens that won’t help and may even harm you.

It’s a disturbing view, with huge im-plications for doctors, policymakers, and health-conscious consumers. And one of its foremost advocates, Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis, has just ascended to a new, prominent platform after years of crusading against the baseless health and medical claims. As the new chief of Stanford University’s Prevention Research Center, Ioannidis is cementing his role as one of medicine’s top mythbusters. “People are being hurt and even dying” because of false medical claims, he says: not quackery, but errors in medical research.

This is Ioannidis’s moment. As medical costs hamper the economy and impede deficit-reduction efforts, policymakers and businesses are desperate to cut them without sacrificing sick people. One no-brainer solution is to use and pay for only treatments that work. But if Ioannidis is right, most biomedical studies are wrong.

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/01/23/why-almost-everything-you-hear-about-medicine-is-wrong.html

[nykym]

1. And that is why they call it

Practicing Medicine!

[buddysmellgood]

2. We need a return to blood letting.

[Maine_Nurse]

4. That is still commonly used for certain conditions. Works well.

[bemildred]

6. And maggot therapy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggot_therapy

[bemildred]

3. Awesome.

I do wonder what "unhealthy skepticism" is in the context of scientific activities?

[Warpy]

5. They rushed HRT onto the market and into women

without investigating the claims because it kept post menopausal women looking fresh and dewy instead of turning into old hags they were stuck with. They only came up with the medical claims after the fact and before they bothered to investigate them. The history of HRT in the 50s and 60s is pretty appalling and reeking with sexism.

In any case, I don't know anyone who practices medicine according to one isolated study or anything reported in pop medical literature.

Doctors (and nurses) do their best and try to stick to things that have worked for the greatest number of people, although only a fool would claim those things work for everybody equally well.

The problem now is that everything is profit driven, the need to make a buck dictating the outcome of a study and necessitating the elimination of negative data.

[Tumbulu]

7. well said- I agree! (nt)