Although I have scheduled posts through the weekend, blogging might be light after that. A relative is struggling from an encounter with Hansonian medicine.
A robust finding in health care economics is that when you compare two populations with similar characteristics, the population on which more is spent on medical care enjoys no better outcomes, where outcomes are usually measured in terms of mortality. Given that we know that some treatments do work, this represents a puzzle.
The most radical way of resolving the puzzle is due to Robin Hanson. He suggests that the treatments that work are offset in the aggregate by treatments that cause harm. It is the latter that I have dubbed “Hansonian medicine.” I have myself witnessed Hansonian medicine take the lives of elderly relatives, although their lives were not shortened by much and their lives almost certainly had been prolonged by previous treatments.
The current episode concerns a recent procedure on a not-so-elderly relative that resulted in a severe infection. Moreover, the condition for which the procedure was undertaken is something that I always suspected may have been brought on by taking statin drugs, so that for years I have said no to doctor recommendations for me to take statins. (Just now, I googled and found that some recent research might support my hypothesis. However, I believe that the consensus is that my personal views are wrong and that statins are a low-cost, high-benefit treatment, which is the opposite of Hansonian medicine.)