Nearly 400 medical devices, procedures and practices found ineffective in study

“We hope our broad results may serve as a starting point for researchers, policy makers and payers who wish to have a list of practices that likely offer no net benefit to use in future work,” Prasad from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), who helped coin the term ‘medical reversal’. “In countries like the US, where there was a 20 [percent] increase in spending between 2013 and 2015, and drug prices alone surpassed the increase in aggregate health care spending, the identification and disuse of costly and ineffective (or possibly harmful) medications and practices are especially important,” the authors write. If randomised independent trials are not conducted rigorously and these medical reversals continue to claim lives and cost absurd amounts of money, public trust in the medical system is bound to disintegrate.

Source: www.sciencealert.com