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Comment by thomastjeffery | Hacker News Reader

A 6-week study of 200 people.

Why is this news?

Well, for starters, it's hard to get 200 people who might be eligible for life-preserving surgery to volunteer to possibly get a sham procedure for the exclusive benefit of othewars; not to mention build a team of surgeons, hospitals, etc. willing to do the trial; and someone to pay for millions of dollars in treatment and administrative costs. Clinical trials involving surgery, especially with sham procedures as a proper control, are exceedingly rare in the US for these reasons. (this is discussed in the OP itself.)

I once read a study that the half life of truth in medicine is 20 years. Namely in 20 years roughly half of the things we identified as truth are overturned. Examples? Fat clogs arteries. Cholesterol clogs arteries. LDL causes heart disease. High blood pressure causes atherosclerosis. All of these "truths" have been debunked in the last 30 years or so. Apparently there are many more. Stents save lives? There's 50% chance you'll be proven wrong in ~20 years! Maybe much sooner.

>I once read a study that the half life of truth in medicine is 20 years.

i heard that as a joke - Medical school dean to his graduates : "A half of the things we taught you will be proven wrong in 5 years. We just don't know which half."

When I was at med school 7 years ago we were told for years. I thought it was just a way of saying that medical knowledge increases so quickly, but then whilst I was there we had:

- Total change in how we manage chest pain/heart attacks (moving from previous full/partial thickness infarction to STEMI/NSTEMI and totally revising treatment algorithms

- Introduction of ipilumimab for melanoma (changed metastatic melanoma from a condition with 6 month average survival to 5 years/chronic disease

- Introduction of cure for help c (previously followed the rule of 20 and it was a chronic disease)

- Total revision of food pyramid

- Multitude others

I believe 4-6 years. So much changes, without CPD/CME you are useless.

Not to mention the difficult of finding patients for surgical trials, especially of relatively pre-existing procedures, the cost per procedure could be (conservatively) $10k making this still a $2M study.

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