‘Bad Medicine’ Freakonomics Radio podcast episode, Dr Vinay Prasad, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Oregon Health and Sciences University, exposes the unsettling reality that ‘evidence-based medicine’ is still not as pervasive as we would all hope.
Dr Vinay Prasad comments:
“… one of the things doctors were doing a lot for people after they had a heart attack was prescribing them an antiarrhythmic drug, that was supposed to keep those aberrant rhythms, those bad heart rhythms, at bay. That drug actually, in a carefully done randomized trial, turned out not to improve survival as we all had thought, but to worsen survival. And that was a watershed moment, I think, where people realized that randomized trials can contradict even the best of what you believe. It really doesn’t matter in medicine that the smartest people believe something works. The only thing that really counts is what is the evidence you have that it works.” [1]
