
Surgery Is One Hell of a Placebo - snewman
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/surgery-is-one-hell-of-a-placebo/
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taxicabjesus
This reminds me of the ProPublic article, _When Evidence Says No, but Doctors
Say Yes:_
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13705761](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13705761)

As I said in that submission, "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."

From the present article:

> Given these results, why do these surgeries remain so widespread? Because
> the ineffectiveness of these procedures can be hard for doctors to see.

All of medicine is handicapped by this phenomenon. A friend had an implant put
in his neck... Was good for a few years, then the pain returned. He went back
to see if the implant had failed: 'no, now the next joint down has failed'.
Implants all the way down.

IMHO, the first implant might have been acceptable if they'd also made an
effort to figure out how to keep his other discs from degenerating in the same
manner.

