The Problem With Medicine: We Don't Know If Most of It Works

The Problem With Medicine: We Don't Know If Most of It Works | Health Policy | DISCOVER Magazine: "A panel of experts convened in 2007 by the prestigious Institute of Medicine estimated that “well below half” of the procedures doctors perform and the decisions they make about surgeries, drugs, and tests have been adequately investigated and shown to be effective. The rest are based on a combination of guesswork, theory, and tradition, with a strong dose of marketing by drug and device companies..."

Bad medicine: cardiology -- Spence 342 -- bmj.com: "We are scientists. But the Big Book of Medical Facts is in fact just a pamphlet printed at home, with two paragraphs in a very large font. The only certainty of science is uncertainty. Medicine is often little more than an opinion, a faith system: we believe that what we do is right. This is despite history telling us that what we do now is almost certainly wrong. Our faith has invented words, rituals, elaborate costumes, and a culture of reverence and deference. And, with clinical signs so subtle that you might question their existence, cardiologists are the highest caste of all."