Why You Should Avoid New Drugs, Surgeries, and Procedures

Thank God for Big Medicine and Big Pharma. They are constantly coming out with amazing new innovations that unlike natural, non-patentable treatments, are proven to work.

I hear all about these wonderful new inventions every time I read a medical journal or go to a conventional medical conference. And this is certainly what many people, including doctors in the United States, believe.

But, is it true? Do all of these “new and improved” treatments stand the test of time? The latest evidence looking at the answers to these questions may very well shock many patients and doctors alike.

It has to do with what are known as medical reversals. “Medical reversals” are something you will never hear about from the mainstream press. That’s because it’s a term that defines instances in which updated clinical trials show that current medical practices are ineffective or misguided. Medical reversals often concern medications, but they can also affect surgical procedures. New research reveals that there are currently almost 400 medical reversals!

Diana Herrera-Perez, a research assistant at the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), in Portland, is the lead author of a new meta-analysis looking at medical reversals. To assess the problem, she and her colleagues examined over 3,000 randomized controlled trials published in three prestigious medical journals over the last 15 years. The journals included The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The Lancet, and The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The analysis discovered 396 medical reversals: 154 of them in JAMA, 129 in NEJM, and 113 in The Lancet.

Most of the medical reversals occurred in the fields of cardiovascular disease (20%), public health and preventive medicine (12%), and critical care (11%). Specifically, the most common reversals involved medications (33%), procedures (20%), vitamins and supplements (13%), devices (9%), and system interventions (8%).

As the study's senior author, Dr. Vinay Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist and associate professor at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute, points out, “Once an ineffective practice is established, it may be difficult to convince practitioners to abandon its use. By aiming to test novel treatments rigorously before they become widespread, we can reduce the number of reversals in practice and prevent unnecessary harm to patients.” He also adds, “We hope our broad results may serve as a starting point for researchers, policymakers, and payers who wish to have a list of practices that likely offer no net benefit to use in future work.”

Co-lead study author Alyson Haslam, PhD, who is also affiliated with the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute, said “Taken together, we hope our findings will help push medical professionals to evaluate their own practices critically and demand high-quality research before adopting a new practice in [the] future, especially for those that are more expensive and/or aggressive than the current standard of care.”

I don’t like to talk about it, but there’s so much money involved in medical care in the United States that there’s not surprisingly a very significant amount of fraudulent and insufficient research. Anything to make a buck applies to medical research just as much as it does in any other field. This is why doctors need to be skeptical about supposedly new and improved medicines and procedures that are more expensive than the ones currently used. Safety first. And safety only comes with time.

If your doctor wants to prescribe a new and supposedly improved treatment or medication, ask him if there is a time-tested, proven treatment instead.

Yours for better health,

Frank Shallenberger, MD