SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Making Health Care Better
from the New York Times (Registration Required)
...[There] is one important way in which medicine never quite adopted the scientific method. The explosion of medical research over the last century has produced a dizzying number of treatments for different ailments. For someone with heart disease, there is bypass surgery, stenting or simply drugs and behavior changes. For a man with early-stage prostate cancer, there is surgery, radiation, proton-beam therapy or so-called watchful waiting.
To enter mainstream use, any such treatment typically needs to clear a high bar. It will be subject to randomized trials, statistical-significance tests, the peer-review process of academic journals and the scrutiny of government regulators.
Yet once a treatment enters the mainstream--once we know whether it works in certain situations--science is largely left behind. The next questions--when to use it and on which patients--become matters of judgment, not measurement. The decision is, once again, left to a doctor's informed intuition.
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