It takes several years of training and practice for any individual to begin to dispense medicine and care for patients. With this in mind, many patients who receive advise from a physician or a surgeon are bound to believe that that professional makes decisions and chooses the most effective methods for treatment that are available to the doctor. H. Gilbert Welch is far more modest by stating that the practice of medicine today is so complex that sometimes medical professionals choose options but are not certain that they are the most cost effective or even the most useful for patients.
Writing this article in the NYT, H. Gilbert Welch goes through a number of treatment options that doctors have dispensed in good faith but whose overall efficacy was not tested as rigorously as required. he now recommends that the ability to step back and conduct evaluation of one treatment option against another in order to determine relative effectiveness is necessary. One method of going through this is to integrate randomized evaluations as a critical part of decision-making by the profession. This call for more research is interesting because it is not intended to find out new methods and drugs but rather to focus on what works in the repertoire of treatments offered today.
This doctor highlights an important but hardly emphasized factor in innovation and knowledge today. Human welfare could be improved substantially by exploring the utility of existing treatments and knowledge but this is often surrendered to the quest for the new. And if that is applicable in a cutting-edge profession like medicine, one wonders how much so in other areas.
Writing this article in the NYT, H. Gilbert Welch goes through a number of treatment options that doctors have dispensed in good faith but whose overall efficacy was not tested as rigorously as required. he now recommends that the ability to step back and conduct evaluation of one treatment option against another in order to determine relative effectiveness is necessary. One method of going through this is to integrate randomized evaluations as a critical part of decision-making by the profession. This call for more research is interesting because it is not intended to find out new methods and drugs but rather to focus on what works in the repertoire of treatments offered today.
This doctor highlights an important but hardly emphasized factor in innovation and knowledge today. Human welfare could be improved substantially by exploring the utility of existing treatments and knowledge but this is often surrendered to the quest for the new. And if that is applicable in a cutting-edge profession like medicine, one wonders how much so in other areas.
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