HOW MUCH OF ORTHODOX MEDICINE IS EVIDENCE BASED?

Anthony Rees
(Secretary-General: TNHA)

Many medical ‘experts’ deplore natural health products, claiming that their use isn’t supported by orthodox scientific rationale.

In the absence of cost prohibitive, double blind, randomized, placebo controlled trials for most natural health products, this notion persists, despite these substances being used traditionally with success for hundreds, and if not thousands of years.

While natural health products continue to be subject to these negative rantings, these ‘experts’ conveniently ignore the mounting evidence that over 50% of the pharmaceutical drugs they prescribe or sell are unlikely to be beneficial or are of unknown effectiveness, despite being ‘registered’ and ‘approved’ by drug regulators.

Prof. John S Garrow, of the UK Health Watch, and Editor of the Journal of Clinical Nutrition conducted research on the top 2500 prescribed treatments prescribed under the UK National Health System (NHS).

His research looked at which treatments were effective (evidence based), which were harmful and which had no effectiveness.

He published a letter in the British Medical Journal detailing starting findings. The pie chart on the right indicates that, of about 2500 treatments, only 15% of treatments were rated as beneficial, 22% as likely to be beneficial, 7% part beneficial and part harmful, 5% unlikely to be beneficial, 4% likely to be ineffective or harmful, and in the remaining 47% the effect of the treatment was “unknown.”

EBM