This information comes from the magazine, Business Week, May, 2006:

“From heart surgery to prostate care, the medical industry knows little about which treatments really work.”

Dr. David Eddy is a heart surgeon and health-care economist.  He started investigating common treatments for various health conditions to find out if they really worked.  “The problem is that we don’t know what we are doing,” he says.  Even today, with a high-tech health-care system that costs the nation $2 trillion a year, there is little or no evidence that many widely used treatments and procedures actually work better than cheaper alternatives.

This judgment pertains to a shocking number of conditions or diseases, from cardiovascular woes to back pain to prostate cancer.  During his long career proving that the practice of medicine is more guesswork than science, Eddy has repeatedly punctured cherished physician myths.  He showed, for instance, that the annual chest X-ray was worthless, over the objections of doctors who made money off the regular visit.  He proved that doctors had little clue about the success rate of procedures such as surgery for enlarged prostates.  He traced one common practice-preventing women from giving birth vaginally if they had previously had a cesarean-to the recommendation of one lone doctor.  Indeed, when he began taking on medicine’s sacred cows, Eddy liked to cite a figure that only 15% of what doctors did was backed by hard evidence.  A great many doctors and health-care quality experts have come to endorse Eddy’s critique.

For example, Can you trust your doctor’s recommendation to have surgery for an aching back?  Make sure you have all the facts.  Evidence says surgery does not fix the problem over the long term any better than time, chiropractic care and exercise.  Pain clinics are full of people who have had back surgery and now are worse off.  $325,000 is spent on spinal fusion each year!  I’ve always said Chiropractic first, drugs second and surgery last!