Selling Snake Oil, The Modern Way

Medicine, today, can seem quite miraculous to individuals.  There are meds for this particular disease, and meds for that particular disease, unlike, say, some of the elixirs sold in the 1800’s, which in many instances were proclaimed as cure alls for everything from abcesses to warts.

But are the meds proclaimed as being so beneficial to individuals, and society, today, necessarily any more effective than the elixirs of the 1800’s?  Not necessarily, as the following quote illustrates.

Sifting through the underlying science reveals that the way in which scientists and drug companies describe the benefits of many medications—by framing the question in terms of “relative risks"—systematically inflates their value.  The result is that patients frequently buy and consume medicines that do very little good.

The article the above was quoted from illustrates the snake oil aspect of modern medicine by looking at the example of cholesterol lowering drugs, or statins, specifically Pravachol, which proclaimed a thirty-one percent (31%) reduction in heart attacks for those downing the pills.  Here’s a more reasoned examination of the above claim.

A 31 percent reduction in heart attacks, after all, seems impressive. Yet this pervasive way of describing clinical trials in medical journals—focusing on the “relative risk,” in this case of heart attack—powerfully exaggerates the benefits of drugs and other invasive therapies. What, after all, does a 31 percent relative reduction in heart attacks mean? In the case of the 1995 study, it meant that taking Pravachol every day for five years reduced the incidence of heart attacks from 7.5 percent to 5.3 percent. This indeed means that there were 31 percent fewer heart attacks in patients taking the drug. But it also means that the “absolute risk” of a heart attack for any given person dropped by only 2.2 percentage points* (from 7.5 percent to 5.3 percent). The benefit of Pravachol can be summarized as a 31 percent relative reduction in heart attacks—or a 2.2 percent absolute reduction.

In real numbers this means that if 100 individuals are taking statins, to reduce the risk of heart attack, only 2 of the 100 individuals will benefit from ingesting the drug.  I’m no statistical wiz bang, but it almost appears that you could ingest one of those elixirs from the 1800’s, or a bowl of oatmeal, which is measurably cheaper, and just possibly reap the same benefit as you would receive from say, Pravachol.

A more conducive method for evaluating the meds so readily prescribed today is termed NNT, or numbers needed to treat.  Not being associated with the medical fields, I was unaware of this term, but, if I some day end up being prescribed one of our moderns medicines, for the ailments I’ll supposedly be susceptible to as I age, I’ll be certain to ask the prescriber for the NNT data on the med being prescribed before I plunk down my hundred bucks for a med that just possibly could be snake oil.

The entire article on this subject was published by Slate and is titled Treat Me?  The crucial health stat you’ve never heard of

Posted by on 10/04 at 03:19 PM

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