It’s quite common for a “standard” medical treatment to work no better than older treatments or none at all.https://twitter.com/StephenPiment/status/1237598764023476225 …
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The article treats this as a case of inadequate regulation — that the FDA is too willing to approve ineffective treatments, and that new liberalizing reforms will allow more ineffective treatments to market.
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You could just as easily interpret it the opposite way: Kefauver-Harris (the law that requires drugs demonstrate efficacy as well as safety) doesn’t work, so it’s raising the price of new treatments for no public benefit.
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I also disagree with framing this as a case of stubborn or avaricious doctors deliberately refusing to do what’s best for patients. I think it’s far more common that medical professionals (and the rest of us!) assume “standard & officially recommended” means “evidence-based.”
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I know firsthand, from meeting my father’s surgeon, that when you’re in a life-or-death situation, the trappings of authority are *very* psychologically compelling and it’s hard to ask tough questions of the guy in the white coat. “This is standard.” “Oh ok.”
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And there’s the usual bias (not just by doctors but by the rest of us) towards believing medical treatment can do more than it can. The narrative is “when you’re sick, a doctor can make you well.” We want to be fussed over and fixed; we’re disappointed by “go home and rest.”
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When a TV show like House MD wants to show that a doctor is a brave maverick, they show him breaking the rules to give patients risky treatments — never breaking the rules to leave patients alone.
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I saw "leave the patient alone" as the right treatment once in an episode of Scrubs, but that may have been the only time.
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