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I am not sure how much the scientific method applies to medicine in general. Medicine is a very diffuse subject. But I work in medical devices and I know for s
by Ididntdothis 6y ago
I am not sure how much the scientific method applies to medicine in general. Medicine is a very diffuse subject.
But I work in medical devices and I know for sure that there isn’t much data available of how well a procedure works. There is no centralized database that tracks outcomes. Most surgeons view a surgery as success if the surgery as such went well. They don’t do much tracking of whether the patient is doing better so there is risk they will keep doing surgeries that don’t really work. The manufacturer gets some information but also not much.
There definitely should be a countrywide or even better worldwide database of outcomes.
- noelsusman 6y agoThere are many centralized databases in the US that track outcomes (e.g. https://www.sts.org/registries-research-center/sts-national-database https://www.sts.org/registries-research-center/sts-national-...).
- Ididntdothis 6y agoI know for sure that my company doesn’t have great long term data about its own devices in the field and even less about competitors. Once implanted, most patients disappear.
- noelsusman 6y agoThe hospitals buying your devices probably do, depending on the device. Our long term data is incomplete because people can switch providers, but we actively monitor long term patient outcomes for a wide range of devices that we use.
- Ididntdothis 6y agoBut how do you get data from thousands of hospitals? I also assume hospitals don’t exchange much data. The data is just very fragmented.