Show 1135: Who Do You Believe–the Experts or the Evidence?
The People's Pharmacy
Joe and Terry Graedon
4.6 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 21 September 2018
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Doctors have been advocating evidence-based medicine for a few decades, but a surprising amount of medical practice is based on tradition. How can you sort out the value of evidence-based medicine from eminence-based medicine? (That is, what the most influential experts recommend, based on their own experience or beliefs.)
The Fate of Medical Mythbusters:
Collecting medical evidence may uncover practices that are not optimal. Are medical mythbusters hailed as heroes, or are they more often pilloried like Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis? (He advocated doctors washing their hands between autopsies and patients.)
Is Evidence Overwhelmed by Conflicts of Interest?
Prominent physicians are often paid handsomely by drug or device makers on the hope that they will prove to be opinion leaders. Such conflicts of interest may go undetected for years, as they did with Dr. José Baselga. Until Sept. 13, 2018, he was chief medical officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering. He stepped down when his supervisors learned that he had not disclosed receiving millions of dollars from health care companies. His case was uncovered by ProPublica and The New York Times, but most doctors don’t get that kind of scrutiny. How can we learn about their conflicts of interest? Why do they matter?
The High Cost of Cancer Treatments:
The development of new cancer treatments such as CAR-T is exciting, but at the prices being charged few patients will be able to benefit. Can our medical system survive such sky-high costs? Find out how patients can make the best decisions on their treatments.
This Week’s Guest:
Vinay Prasad, MD, MPH, is a practicing hematologist oncologist and internal medicine physician. He is an associate professor of medicine and public health at Oregon Health and Science University. Dr. Prasad with Adam Cifu is author of Ending Medical Reversal: Improving Outcomes, Saving Lives. His website is http://www.vinayakkprasad.com/
Listen to the Podcast:
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Transcript
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| 0:16.0 | The People's Pharmacy Podcast is sponsored by the Brain Gage, developed by neuroscientists at the University of North Carolina to study brain function across a wide range of applications including aging and traumatic brain injury. The brain gauge translates state-of-the-art neuroscience into easy-to-use methods that let you take control of your brain health. |
| 0:25.0 | Now available for home, research, and clinical applications. |
| 0:30.0 | Find out more at gaugeage Your Brain.com. |
| 0:35.0 | This episode is also brought to you by Green Chef. |
| 0:38.0 | For $50 off your first box of Green Chef |
| 0:42.0 | go to Green chef dot US slash Joe. How do doctors |
| 0:48.4 | decide on the best treatment for a patient ideally they'd rely on scientific evidence. Is that always the case? |
| 0:55.9 | This is the People's Pharmacy with Terry and Joe Grady. Dr. |
| 1:05.0 | Vene Prasad is an oncologist, an expert on evidence-based medicine and medical reversals. |
| 1:13.0 | He's also taken a heart look at conflicts of interest in how they affect the practice of medicine. |
| 1:18.0 | Doctors are judges. |
| 1:19.8 | They're judges of medical evidence. |
| 1:21.4 | They're judges of the harms and the benefits. We don't think they are, but they really are. |
| 1:27.0 | And we need to hold them to the same standard we would hold anyone who's calling balls and strikes. |
| 1:31.8 | We'll also discuss the high cost of new cancer treatments. |
| 1:35.1 | Coming up on the People's Pharmacy, who do you believe? |
| 1:38.0 | The experts or the evidence? |
| 1:40.0 | First, the news. In the People's Pharmacy Health Headlines, |
| 1:50.0 | ever since the physician's health study showed 30 years ago that low dose aspirin |
| 1:54.7 | could reduce the likelihood of heart attacks in men over 50, people have been using |
| 1:59.3 | aspirin to reduce their risk of heart disease. In recent weeks, however, new studies have upended the |
| 2:05.2 | expectation that aspirin can be used for prevention. Three papers published in the New England |
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