4 ms·
Surgery Is One Hell of a Placebo
- taxicabjesus 9y agoThis 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.