I liked the example in the article you linked about depression diagnosis—the way that after receiving a diagnosis about major depressive disorder, some number of patients over time no longer have depression, even when they do not receive any treatment. This seems especially true in medicine in general, it was at least true for medieval times where sometimes the best chances someone had for life were if they had the least amount of medical interventions—that is still true to an extent today.
Plus there is an effect that if you for example have cancer and you have a consultation about what the best move forward is, whatever expertise area the doctor consulting you has is going to be the likeliest treatment you’ll choose to take, probably related to their highest confidence level in that method working since they know it the best. But there are no doctors that specialise in just doing nothing, or doing something equivalent to that. Some solid RCT work here could shift the balance a bit more and result in healthier people with less unnecessary interventions.
Big fan of OWID!
I liked the example in the article you linked about depression diagnosis—the way that after receiving a diagnosis about major depressive disorder, some number of patients over time no longer have depression, even when they do not receive any treatment. This seems especially true in medicine in general, it was at least true for medieval times where sometimes the best chances someone had for life were if they had the least amount of medical interventions—that is still true to an extent today.
Plus there is an effect that if you for example have cancer and you have a consultation about what the best move forward is, whatever expertise area the doctor consulting you has is going to be the likeliest treatment you’ll choose to take, probably related to their highest confidence level in that method working since they know it the best. But there are no doctors that specialise in just doing nothing, or doing something equivalent to that. Some solid RCT work here could shift the balance a bit more and result in healthier people with less unnecessary interventions.