
When Evidence Says No, but Doctors Say Yes - maxerickson
https://www.propublica.org/article/when-evidence-says-no-but-doctors-say-yes
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taxicabjesus
Sometimes medicine helps patients, sometimes the medical-industrial complex
makes work for itself. I took a lot of medicaid patients to & from doctor
appointments where nothing much was accomplished.

> In 2012, Brown had coauthored a paper that examined every randomized
> clinical trial that compared stent implantation with more conservative forms
> of treatment, and he found that _stents for stable patients prevent zero
> heart attacks and extend the lives of patients a grand total of not at all._
> In general, Brown says, _“nobody that’s not having a heart attack needs a
> stent.”_ [...] Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of stable patients receive
> stents annually, and one in 50 will suffer a serious complication or die as
> a result of the implantation procedure. [emphasis added]

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maxerickson
_sometimes the medical-industrial complex makes work for itself._

Indeed. The article also discusses a lot of other factors that feed into
ineffective treatments. Expectations of patients, poorly done research, the
difficulty of combining treatment with statistically valid trials, doctors not
keeping up with research, doctors not being particularly willing to follow the
results of research they do read, and on and on.

