One of the things that I was most surprised by when I joined the medical field was how variable the average patient benefit was for different therapies. Obviously, Alzheimer’s treatments are less helpful than syphilis ones, but even within treatment categories, there are huge ranges in actual efficacy for treatments with similar cost, materials, and public conception.

What worries me about this is that not only in public but within the medical establishment, actually differentiating these therapies–and therefore deciding what therapies, ultimately, to use and pay for–is not prioritized in medical practice.

I wrote about this on my company’s blog, but its concept is purely as a comment on the most surprising dichotomy I learned about–that between stenting (no benefit shown for most patients!!) vs. clot retrieval during strokes (amazing benefits, including double the odds of good neurological outcome). Amazingly, the former is a far more common procedure, and the latter is underprovided in rural areas and in most countries outside of the US, EU, Japan, and Korea. Read more here: https://about.nested-knowledge.com/2020/01/27/not-all-minimally-invasive-procedures-are-created-equal/.