In a world where 85% of doctors can't solve simple Bayesian word problems...
In a world where only 20.9% of reported results that a pharmaceutical company tries to investigate for development purposes, fully replicate...
In a world where "p-values" are anything the author wants them to be...
...and where there are all sorts of amazing technologies and techniques which nobody at your hospital has ever heard of...
...there's also MetaMed. Instead of just having “evidence-based medicine” in journals that doctors don't actually read, MetaMed will provide you with actual evidence-based healthcare. Their Chairman and CTO is Jaan Tallinn (cofounder of Skype, major funder of xrisk-related endeavors), one of their major VCs is Peter Thiel (major funder of MIRI), their management includes some names LWers will find familiar, and their researchers know math and stats and in many cases have also read LessWrong. If you have a sufficiently serious problem and can afford their service, MetaMed will (a) put someone on reading the relevant research literature who understands real statistics and can tell whether the paper is trustworthy; and (b) refer you to a cooperative doctor in their network who can carry out the therapies they find.
MetaMed was partially inspired by the case of a woman who had her fingertip chopped off, was told by the hospital that she was screwed, and then read through an awful lot of literature on her own until she found someone working on an advanced regenerative therapy that let her actually grow the fingertip back. The idea behind MetaMed isn't just that they will scour the literature to find how the best experimentally supported treatment differs from the average wisdom - people who regularly read LW will be aware that this is often a pretty large divergence - but that they will also look for this sort of very recent technology that most hospitals won't have heard about.
This is a new service and it has to interact with the existing medical system, so they are currently expensive, starting at $5,000 for a research report. (Keeping in mind that a basic report involves a lot of work by people who must be good at math.) If you have a sick friend who can afford it - especially if the regular system is failing them, and they want (or you want) their next step to be more science instead of "alternative medicine" or whatever - please do refer them to MetaMed immediately. We can’t all have nice things like this someday unless somebody pays for it while it’s still new and expensive. And the regular healthcare system really is bad enough at science (especially in the US, but science is difficult everywhere) that there's no point in condemning anyone to it when they can afford better.
I also got my hands on a copy of MetaMed's standard list of citations that they use to support points to reporters. What follows isn't nearly everything on MetaMed's list, just the items I found most interesting.
90% of preclinical cancer studies could not be replicated:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a.html
My view:
MetaMed is designed to extract the maximal amount of information out of the medical research community that exists today. Much of their value-add involves 'meta' evidence that is difficult for others to collect or interpret. (A doctor may be skilled at understanding how a part of the body works, but not how the medical research community actually works.) If you have a condition that is serious, rare, or strange enough that investing $5k in making medical attention more effective seems like a good idea, then you should talk to MetaMed. MetaMed is in no way a substitute for doctors; it's a way to find which doctors you should be talking to, and about what.
Watson can be a substitute for doctors. The key enabler for Watson is massive amounts of data on patients, and the statistical knowledge to make good use of that data. One of the things to remember here is that expert diagnosis systems have been around for a long time, but that if you're expert enough to prepare the relevant information for the computer you're probably expert enough to make an okay guess yourself, at which point using the computer doesn't seem very high priority. Eventually, Watson will enable patients and nurses to input most of the necessary information using natural language. It doesn't look like Watson is a substitute for medical research, but is rather a complement to it- if you have all the patient data together, you can build great models, and great models allow for superior discoveries. (Watson might eventually be able to automate parts of the hypothesis-generating and testing aspects of medical research, but I expect humans to have strong to moderate comparative advantage here for at least two decades.)
The short version: MetaMed makes better use of existing evidence that anyone else; Watson will generate a river of new evidence that will dramatically alter all parts of medicine.
[Emphasis mine]
Dear Bayes, I hope not! I'd hope there's much more precise info that could be input instead.