Great stuff over at Sensible Medicine and Cardiology Trials
We featured today a guest post from Dr. Kuma Folmsbee on saving primary care. I loved it because it centered on the core mission of doctoring: helping people who are asking for our help. Medicine excels when we treat illness. Medicine is much trickier when we try to help people who complain of nothing.
We also had a podcast discussion about the MAHA movement and other things. I do love talking with Adam and Vinay.
Yesterday, I wrote about the new non-opioid pain reliever suzetrigine. While there is a huge unmet need for non-opioid pain relief, the actual evidence is underwhelming.
And, of course, Andrew Foy, Muhammed Ruzieh, and my quest to chronicle the seminal trials in cardiology continues over at CardiologyTrials Substack.
Thanks for reading and supporting our work.
ONE OF THE THINGS that may confuse people about the effectiveness of current medical therapy is the practice of defining the effectiveness of a therapy by the ‘RELATIVE RISK REDUCTION ‘ rather than the absolute risk reduction of a therapy For example if the odds of getting killed by cancer is 2 in 500 and a new drug reduced the risk to 1 in 500, this is a 50% relative risk reduction which may sound impressive but the absolute is reduced from 2 in 500 to 1 in 500, quite different from the relative risk reduction
Most medical journals do not report the absolute risk reduction in the abstract provided without a subscription. So If you don’t prescribe to the journal you have to pay $50 to find it out. The situation creates the opportunity to lie with statistics TV adds for drugs do this a lot.
There’s some good stuff on Sensible Medicine but there are also occasional posts which I think are total garbage. I’ve listed a couple in my own post on Insensible Medicine.