Lumifer comments on MetaMed: Evidence-Based Healthcare - Less Wrong

83 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 March 2013 01:16PM

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Comment author: Lumifer 03 March 2015 02:50:33AM *  6 points [-]

this company takes medicine's research results and then say they can handle and aggregate it better than the doctors who are licensed to do exactly that

Doctors are not licensed to "handle and aggregate" research results. They are licensed to treat people as best as they can and keeping up with the latest academic research is not a requirement for keeping their license. In fact, most doctors are too busy treating people to allocate enough time to read research.

this post induces distrust in legally-professed medicine

I consider this a good thing and I say this as someone who has doctors in the family and doctors among friends. Medics are not gods and not even engineers -- an attempt to make medicine "evidence-based" is proceeding over a lot of screaming and dragging heels. In some areas -- like e.g. surgery -- contemporary medicine is pretty good. In other areas -- like e.g. nutrition -- it's pretty bad.

And what's up with your obsession with "legally-professed"? Getting a license doesn't magically grant you smarts and competence. There are a lot of different doctors and some of them are really not good doctors.

...without actually formally, academically challenging the status quo

I believe their advice is based on published medical research which is precisely what you are asking for.

Comment author: EHeller 03 March 2015 02:56:35AM 1 point [-]

I think the bigger issue with metamed is that they are trying to fill a role that already exists in the market. UpToDate is a bigger, more ambitious company (instead of generating per-patient reports they have a huge database of research summaries curated by actual experts for each disease) that almost all academic medical centers already pay for.