http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/294/2/218.abstract http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/the-ideology-of-hea... (If someone could find a British metastudy containing a nice graph indicating ~50% of current standard medical treatments has no evidence of effectiveness, I would appreciate it - have had much trouble locating it.)
But of course, doctors are not scientists.
"What percentage of the around 3000 treatments included in Clinical Evidence fall into each category:
- 11% Beneficial
- 23% Likely to be beneficial
- 7% Trade off between benefits and harm
- 51% Unknown effectiveness
- 5% Unlikely to be beneficial
- 3% Likely to be ineffective or harmful
I haven't seen that study, but if you look up any given common medical condition, for many of them there are studies about what percentage of those diagnosed are being treated in accordance with best practices. And for most conditions it's usually not more than a third. Doctors usually just prescribe whatever is advertised the most regardless of whether or not it's even remotely effective or safe, e.g. http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/99/15/2055
The study also indicated a small percentage of treatments evidenced as actually harmful, so that in the end only a third of the treatments were efficacious.
My own experience in a clinical setting showed that most doctors (say, outside a university health system) have trouble keeping up with the research in their field.
There is a study somewhere about what percentages of doctors can name at least one finding from their medical field within the last year, and it was some abysmally low figure. Do you happen to know what I'm referencing? I am looking for the cite for something, but can't find it unfortunately.