When Evidence Says No, but Doctors Say Yes

Sometimes medicine helps patients, sometimes the medical-industrial complex makes work for itself. I took a lot of medicaid patients to & from doctor appointments where nothing much was accomplished.

> In 2012, Brown had coauthored a paper that examined every randomized clinical trial that compared stent implantation with more conservative forms of treatment, and he found that stents for stable patients prevent zero heart attacks and extend the lives of patients a grand total of not at all. In general, Brown says, “nobody that’s not having a heart attack needs a stent.” [...] Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of stable patients receive stents annually, and one in 50 will suffer a serious complication or die as a result of the implantation procedure. [emphasis added]