Thousands of useless procedures
(the link to the article is below).
How could this happen?
Companies with drugs and medical devices often won’t even attempt to validate their procedures and pharmeceuticals by comparing them to a placebo control. It’s just too risky in case they get a negative result.
It’s much better to compare their products to competing products — so even if the outcome is “just as good as the competing brand”, that’s still a sellable position.
That’s why you see study results like this one — only after the drug or procedure gets onto the market, and doctors distribute it into the population, do we finally get to make those critical assesments. Assessments like, is this procedure or drug any better than doing nothing at all??
In the mean time, thousands of women underwent a useless procedure and our healthcare system paid out millions of dollars, again, for a useless procedure.
http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_16052/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=EGlh6Fxk
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