and it is likely that since medicine has 'profits' in the practice, especially in the US, that we all unwittingly are buyers. Physicians become complicit when certain practices are performed. My husband was convinced to have an implanted cardiac defibrillator "installed". Why that brand? I think there were several on the market. And why was the product representative in the surgical suite?[Backstory: he had a cardiac event, and coded in the ambulance, on a ferry, and was shocked back. He was Dxed with a heart rhythm called long Q-T. That might have been genetic, but he had not had an electrocardiogram done before that showed that, and the proximate cause of the episode was electrolyte imbalance due to GI upset. So long Q-T is a survivable syndrome, just don't get an electrolyte imbalance. He opted for the implant, it never activated, and things went south with his health and he died] Awful truth: when he was near-death, I made sure that the device was deactivated with a magnet so it would not try to shock him back.

I am a scientist (PhD, genetics) and I was his advocate and translator through this stuff. when he died, and since his father had died of heart problems (maybe), I worried about a genetic link and his sister and my children were ECGd to check for long Q-T. Aha, sister had it, and against my advice got a defibrillator implant. My children had normal ECGs. Out of curiosity, I investigated that syndrome further, and lo and behold, the antidepressant that both brother and sister ate like candy, Prozac, had a listed side effect of long Q-T. No one ever mentioned that.

In my mind, the mini-experiment would be to change medication on the same person and see if the syndrome disappears. But depressives are unwilling to stop something that works for their primary complaint. At least the one I know. But that would be a great experiment.

My second observation is that Americans want the quick fix, and will rush toward a cure because one is offered. Same sister-in-law (also a wingnut) is a hypochondriac whose knees are going. A"stem cell therapy" is offered, to inject "stem cells" into the knee cartilage to make new cartilage. From what I can deduce from medical literature, that does not work, except anecdotally by patients who paid for it. There are "clinics" who do this, for thousands of dollars, and the prices vary, also by thousands of dollars. Too many red flags for me. Sounds rentier to me. And so it goes.

She quit saying that the way research was done and presented, was not science-based and she could no longer participate.

“…Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” — Marcia Angell, M, author of “The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It”

“In view of this control and the conflicts of interest that permeate the enterprise, it is not surprising that industry-sponsored trials published in medical journals consistently favor sponsors —largely because negative results are not published, positive results are repeatedly published in slightly different forms, and a positive spin is put on even negative results. A review of seventy-four clinical trials of antidepressants, for example, found that thirty-seven of thirty-eight positive studies were published. But of the thirty-six negative studies, thirty-three were either not published or published in a form that conveyed a positive outcome.” — Marcia Angell, MD

and if you read medical journal articles, you will be horrified by an awful lot of what is published and then presented as firm recommendations, from medical groups and on the morning news. And that is without even considering the validity of the data, which has all the problems mentioned above.

Some of it is honest ignorance, because you'll often see all the steps they took proudly detailed - steps which invalidate any conclusion anyone could draw from their data.

Sometimes you'll read a sad little note from a statistician, saying you really shouldn't do X, Y, Z. Doesn't seem to make any difference.