By using this site, you agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Accept
Health Works CollectiveHealth Works CollectiveHealth Works Collective
  • Health
    • Mental Health
    Health
    Healthcare organizations are operating on slimmer profit margins than ever. One report in August showed that they are even lower than the beginning of the…
    Show More
    Top News
    headphones can create health problems
    The Harmful Health Effects of Using Headphones
    September 24, 2021
    Headache causes
    4 Causes Of Headache You Probably Didn’t Know About
    December 28, 2021
    follow these steps to recover from your injury
    What Steps Should You Take to Recover More Quickly from an Injury?
    April 12, 2022
    Latest News
    7 Most Common Healthcare Accreditation Programs: Which Should You Use?
    August 20, 2025
    Hospital Pest Control and the Fight Against Superbugs
    August 20, 2025
    Hygiene Beyond The Clinic: Attention To Overlooked Non-Clinical Spaces
    August 13, 2025
    5 Steps to a Promising Career as a Healthcare Administrator
    August 3, 2025
  • Policy and Law
    • Global Healthcare
    • Medical Ethics
    Policy and Law
    Get the latest updates about Insurance policies and Laws in the Healthcare industry for different geographical locations.
    Show More
    Top News
    private
    Private Exchanges: Getting Ready for Individual Health Insurance to Be the Standard
    January 9, 2014
    valueable healthcare programs
    5 Most Valuable Healthcare Programs in 2023
    March 8, 2023
    Johnson & Johnson to Release Clinical Trial Data in Agreement with Yale Medical School
    February 4, 2014
    Latest News
    How Social Security Disability Shapes Access to Care and Everyday Health
    August 22, 2025
    How a DUI Lawyer Can Help When Your Future Health Feels Uncertain
    August 22, 2025
    How One Fall Can Lead to a Long Road of Medical Complications
    August 22, 2025
    How IT and Marketing Teams Can Collaborate to Protect Patient Trust
    July 17, 2025
  • Medical Innovations
  • News
  • Wellness
  • Tech
Search
© 2023 HealthWorks Collective. All Rights Reserved.
Reading: Why I Don’t Adhere to Evidence-Based Medical Care
Share
Notification Show More
Font ResizerAa
Health Works CollectiveHealth Works Collective
Font ResizerAa
Search
Follow US
  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy
© 2023 HealthWorks Collective. All Rights Reserved.
Health Works Collective > Business > Finance > Why I Don’t Adhere to Evidence-Based Medical Care
BusinessDiagnosticsFinanceHealth ReformHospital AdministrationPolicy & LawPublic HealthWellness

Why I Don’t Adhere to Evidence-Based Medical Care

JohnCGoodman
JohnCGoodman
Share
6 Min Read
SHARE

My concierge doctor and I the other day were going over the results of my latest blood test, which he insists that I get with some regularity.

My cholesterol was fine. Free testosterone was perfect. But I was below where I need to be on vitamin D. Ditto for the DHEA vitamin…

My concierge doctor and I the other day were going over the results of my latest blood test, which he insists that I get with some regularity.

My cholesterol was fine. Free testosterone was perfect. But I was below where I need to be on vitamin D. Ditto for the DHEA vitamin…

More Read

Here’s How Blockchain Can Benefit Healthcare, And Why It Matters
Enhancing Physician-Patient Communication: A Key To Better Healthcare Outcomes
Lyme Disease Even Scarier? Maybe
How Powerful Patients Save the System Money
10 Trade Secrets: How Exceptional Public Speakers Make It Look Easy

Wait a minute. Testosterone? No, free testosterone. Okay, where is there any randomized controlled trial showing that free testosterone is good for your health? The ones that I know of are not much help. And there probably won’t be others any time soon. Even if they get around to another clinical trial, I may not pay any attention to it. More on that below.

On my own

Why should you care? Because we are about to enter a world in which health insurers will only pay for procedures and drugs that are strictly evidenced-based. In fact we are about to enter a world in which doctors will be encouraged to reflexively practice evidence-based medicine for all patients ― regardless of who is paying the bill.

This will have consequences. Just about everything my doctor and I were doing the other day probably violates evidence-based guidelines, including ordering a blood test on an otherwise healthy patient.

As for free testosterone, there is a book on it written by Abraham Morgentaler, a professor at Harvard Medical School. Dr Morgentaler’s bio describes him as a “medical maverick” and a “pioneer” in men’s health, which is another way of saying he doesn’t practice mainstream medicine.

But remember, every advance in medicine started with someone doing something out of the ordinary, something different, something no one else was doing.

If you insist on only employing therapies that are evidence-based, you will only get access to many useful therapies years — or perhaps decades — after other patients have befitted from them.

What about vitamin D? Actually there have been a number of trials with it and it looks like it’s good for you. Unfortunately, there is no evidence-based guideline for testing for vitamin D deficiency, which of course is what my doctor and I did. If your insurer is telling your doctor what to do, odds are you will never know whether you are vitamin D deficient.

There have also been trials with DHEA and they are positive, but probably not sufficiently so for your insurer to pay for it and certainly not enough for your insurer to approve screening for DHEA deficiency.

There have been trials on vitamins as a whole  and the results haven’t been good. This, despite the fact that Prof. Bruce Ames (University of California at Berkley) has found striking effects of vitamins in rodent studies. Like Bruce Ames, my doctor believes in vitamins.

This brings us to the whole problem with much medical research. Suppose we conduct a clinical trial on eating peanut butter — just to see what difference it makes. And low and behold we find that there is no significant effect for 99 diseases, but peanut butter eaters have significantly lower risk of Parkinson’s disease.

There are three problems with this finding. The first is called “data mining.” If the distributions are normal, statistics teaches us that about 5 percent of the time we are going to find a significant effect, even though the relationship is entirely spurious. When you hear the term “95 percent confidence interval,” that normally implies we are 95 percent confident the relationship is real. Here is the flip side of that: if we are data mining — searching for anything significant among hundreds of variables — we are going to find spurious relationships as well.

The second problem is that this is testing without theory. There is a statistically significant relationship between the cock crowing and the sun rising, but without any theory relating the two we cannot conclude that the former causes the latter.

Finally, our peanut butter test left out variables that we know are important — including the role of genes. (We didn’t ask the participants if there was a history of Parkinson’s in their family.)

As I have noted before, most medical research would be rejected if the standards of the economics journals were applied.

What should insurance pay for? I don’t have a problem with evidence-based insurance. That’s probably a good way to keep premiums low and shield us from the cost of other people trying out every cockeyed claim that comes their way.

But it is advisable for each of us to have a Health Savings Account, so that we can use our own judgment and make our own choices when it appears in our interest to do so.

TAGGED:evidence-based medicine
Share This Article
Facebook Copy Link Print
Share

Stay Connected

1.5kFollowersLike
4.5kFollowersFollow
2.8kFollowersPin
136kSubscribersSubscribe

Latest News

engineer fitting prosthetic arm
How Social Security Disability Shapes Access to Care and Everyday Health
Health care
August 20, 2025
a woman explaining the document
How a DUI Lawyer Can Help When Your Future Health Feels Uncertain
Public Health
August 20, 2025
physiotherapist at work
How One Fall Can Lead to a Long Road of Medical Complications
Health care
August 20, 2025
Common Healthcare Accreditation Programs
7 Most Common Healthcare Accreditation Programs: Which Should You Use?
Health News
August 20, 2025

You Might also Like

What Kind of Inequality Matters to You?

October 19, 2011

Forecast: Sunny Skies, But Now Is the Time to Protect Your Facility From Future Storms

April 7, 2016
pharma and social media ROI
BusinesseHealthFinanceSocial Media

The Three Letters That Kill Social Media in Pharma

December 3, 2013

Readmissions: Hard to Predict Who it Will Be and Why

June 18, 2011
Subscribe
Subscribe to our newsletter to get our newest articles instantly!
Follow US
© 2008-2025 HealthWorks Collective. All Rights Reserved.
  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy
Welcome Back!

Sign in to your account

Username or Email Address
Password

Lost your password?