2 ms·
> I'm just a bit shocked how pre-modern our system for collecting this knowledge appears to be. I'm not an expert, but I imagine any more advanced system would
by majewsky 6y ago
> I'm just a bit shocked how pre-modern our system for collecting this knowledge appears to be.
I'm not an expert, but I imagine any more advanced system would be extremely problematic from a data protection point of view (think HIPAA etc.). In a study, patients sign multiple pages of legalese to allow the researchers to collect all the required data. You don't have that with regular patients in a GP's office.
- iguy 6y agoYes that's a hurdle. But even without that, it seems hard to design a good system. If most of the doctors treat the very sick cases (among those diagnosed with X) with drugs Y+Z currently rumoured to work, how do you disentangle the causes of their poor outcomes? More generally, how do we know it isn't mostly garbage? That seems to be the consensus about most pre-20th-C medicine, and those guys weren't idiots, they were just trying things out and sharing ideas...