How can there be no formal approval process for surgical procedures? This drives me crazy. Surgical procedures should have a high evidence standard just like drugs. Otherwise how can a patient be confident in the science?
My father was a neurosurgeon. Sorry to burst your bubble, but when you go to someone like him, it is not called medical science. It is medical practice.
The medical industry does not provide the information required to be confident in your personal outcome. At best they can provide statistics about populations. On an individual basis, it is an absolute crap shoot.
I think you can relax - because there is a very high evidence standard in surgery. It’s just not regulated in that traditional sense because there are way too many variations and caveats to everything. There are a million niches and each one is occupied by a tiny group of specialists who know everything about theirs. I know this because I’ve been to their conferences and they invest a lot of energy into collecting statistics, verifying hypotheses, trying out subtle improvements etc. And then they argue for ever and ever about which approach delivers an ever so slight advantage or improvement.
There was a study out of the UK on here recently that seems to indicate most Orthopedic surgeries are worse than no surgery. So I'm very not relaxed :)
