DISPROVEN, NOT DISCARDED

I was recently looking for some statistics on iatrogenesis. That's just a fancy term for the medical system screwing up and causing harm rather than preventing or relieving it. Think: hospital acquired infections, adverse drug reactions, medical errors, psychological damage, and the like. However, as so often happens, I couldn't find what I was looking for but accidentally stumbled upon this extremely interesting study on the prevalence of ineffective medical treatments and practices.

I'd never given much thought to how common ineffective or low-value treatments are or to the ills resulting from them. Medical interventions demonstrated to be ineffective or just arbitrarily costing more than alternatives of equivalent effectiveness aren’t just merely bad. Low-value practices and treatments are shown to result in a spectrum of harms and yield detrimental opportunity and financial costs, all while undermining the public's faith in medicine. (See: Beaudin-Seiler, 2016; Korenstein et al, 2018; Prasad et al, 2013; Schpero, 2014.) It’s a real problem.

This systematic review looked at 15 years worth of studies (covering more than 3,000 articles) published in leading medical journals: The Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and The New England Journal of Medicine. Found within all fields of medicine, these researchers uncovered a total of 396 ineffective medical practices, procedures, therapies, medications, dietary supplements, medical devices, tests, and screenings, all of which were demonstrated ineffective, or worse, through randomized controlled trials. Troublingly, you can find these disproven medical offerings being promoted and delivered to patients all around the world.

So, here are some examples of low-value aids, treatments, screenings, procedures, and hospital protocols impacting loads of people:

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