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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

Chemotherapy is more of an exception than the norm when it comes to what treatments are acceptable. Most other drugs have to be proven safe to use even before showing tangible benefits. And even in oncology there are Phase I studies to ensure that your treatment is not Too toxic either. So yeah, Do Not Harm is very much a thing.

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> Most other drugs have to be proven safe to use even before showing tangible benefits.

What? I encourage you to read about prescription drug side effects. If a drug were safe, it would be over the counter rather than prescription. Prescription drugs are exactly the kind of harm/benefit bundle GP is describing.

As someone with chronic migraines, the question is very much about benefits outweighing costs. Also largely ineffective.

the benefit should always outweigh the risks, that goes without saying.

My apologies, my previous post was not clear on what I was really questioning. I am attempting to hold up chemotherapy as an example of pragmatism which exposes how the premise of "Do not harm" is not a helpful rule. I believe we may be conflating "proven safe" with "does absolutely does no harm", which are much different standards.

Assessing treatments on thereputic merit - does a treatment create significantly more benefit than it does harm (As chemotherapy is a standard bearing example), is, based on the evidence I've observed, the preferable approach.

It's not exactly an exception; it's just on one end of the spectrum. The more serious the illness, the more serious the treatment side effects we tend to tolerate.

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