zlacker

>>bondar+(OP)
> The theory here is largely mechanical

I’ve long felt that the reliance on population-statistics (RCT) rather than individual diagnosis highlights how little we really know about medicine.

A mechanic wouldn’t try to fix a car based on a checklist of symptoms interventions that work X% of the time across the population of cars; they would actually inspect the pieces and try to positively identify e.g. a worn/broken component. Of course, this is harder in the human body.

I’m hopeful that as diagnostics become cheaper and more democratized (eg you can now get an ultrasound to plug into your iPhone for ~$1k), we’ll be able to make “medicine 3.0” I.e. truly personalized medicine, available as standard rather than a luxury available to the 0.1%.

>>thepti+S81
Nitpicking on the mechanic point, but this is pretty common, just not at the same level of detail as medicine. Certain brands, models, and parts are more likely to fail in certain ways, so if a model comes in with symptoms of a known, high frequency problem, many times that work will be done first rather than taking more of the car apart to inspect individual parts.

Certainly I didn't think there's huge bodies of work on those statistics the same way there is for medicine, but any car repair forum online will give you some sense of this