by Andrew Leigh
33Franz H. Messerli, ‘Chocolate consumption, cognitive function, and Nobel laureates’, New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 367, no. 16, 2012, pp. 1562–64.
34Larry Orr, Social Experiments: Evaluating Public Programs with Experimental Methods, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999, p. xi, quoted in Judith Gueron & Rolston, Fighting for Reliable Evidence, New York: Russell Sage, 2013, p. 1.
35See also Angus Deaton & Nancy Cartwright, ‘Understanding and misunderstanding randomized controlled trials’, NBER Working Paper 22595, Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2016.
36Gordon C.S. Smith & Jill P. Pell, 2003, ‘Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: Systematic review of randomised controlled trials’, British Medical Journal, vol. 327, pp. 1459–61.
37In one instance, locals in New Mexico found the crash dummies before investigators could reach them, and told the local news outlet that an alien spacecraft had tried to reach earth, but the aliens had been killed in the attempt: ‘Air Force reportedly says aliens were crash dummies’, Daily Eastern News, 23 June 1997, p. 2. The incident occurred in 1947 in the city of Roswell and sparked a television series by the same name.
38Paul J. Amoroso, Jack B. Ryan, Barry Bickley, et al., ‘Braced for impact’; David J. Wehrly, Low Altitude, High Speed Personnel Parachuting, PN, 1987; Raymond A. Madson, High Altitude Balloon Dummy Drops, PN, 1957.
39See, for example, Emma Aisbett, Markus Brueckner, Ralf Steinhauser & Rhett Wilcox, ‘Fiscal stimulus and household consumption: Evidence from the 2009 Australian Nation Building and Jobs Plan’, ANU CEPR Discussion Paper 689, Canberra: ANU, 2013.
40For an extensive discussion, see Deaton and Cartwright, ‘Understanding and misunderstanding’.
41Quoted in Bernard Teague, Ronald McLeod & Susan Pascoe, 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission, Melbourne: Parliament of Victoria, 2010.
42Andy Willans, quoted in Teague, McLeod & Pascoe, 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission.
43Teague, McLeod and Pascoe, 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission, Vol. I, p. 149.
44N.C. Surawski, A.L. Sullivan, C.P. Meyer, et al., ‘Greenhouse gas emissions from laboratory-scale fires in wildland fuels depend on fire spread mode and phase of combustion’, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, vol. 15, no. 9, 2015, pp. 5259–73.
45R.H. Luke & A.G. McArthur ‘Bushfires in Australia’, Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1978; Andrew Sullivan, ‘Towards the next generation of operational fire spread models’, PowerPoint presentation, 16 May 2012. A commonly used formulation of the McArthur equation for the Forest Fire Danger Index is FFDI = 2e^(0.45 + 0.987lnD - 0.0345H + 0.0338T + 0.0234V), where D is the drought factor (between 0 and 10, depending on fuel availability), H is relative humidity (%), T is temperature (°C) and V is wind speed (km/h). The FFDI is then used to determine a fire danger rating: Low (0–5), Moderate (5–12), High (12–24), Very High (24–50), Extreme (50–100), Catastrophic (100+). See Andrew J. Dowdy, Graham A. Mills, Klara Finkele & William de Groot, ‘Australian fire weather as represented by the McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index and the Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index’, CAWCR Technical Report No. 10, Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, Canberra: CSIRO, 2009.
46I first became aware of Stark’s story in David Hunt, Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia, Volume 1, Melbourne: Black Inc., 2013. For a full account, see William Stark (revised and published by James Smyth), The Works of the Late William Stark, M.D. Consisting of Clinical and Anatomical Observations, with Experiments, Dietetical and Statical, London: J.Johnson, 1788.
47Alan Saunders, Martyrs of Nutrition, Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
2 FROM BLOODLETTING TO PLACEBO SURGERY
1Peter F. Choong, Michelle M. Dowsey & James D. Stone, ‘Does accurate anatomical alignment result in better function and quality of life? Comparing conventional and computer-assisted total knee arthroplasty’, The Journal of Arthroplasty, vol. 24, no. 4, 2009, pp. 560–9; Nathaniel F.R. Huang, Michelle M. Dowsey, Eric Ee, et al., ‘Coronal alignment correlates with outcome after total knee arthroplasty: Five-year follow-up of a randomized controlled trial’, The Journal of Arthroplasty, vol. 27, no. 9, 2012, pp. 1737–41.
2Sina Babazadeh, Michelle M. Dowsey, James D. Stoney & Peter F.M. Choong, ‘Gap balancing sacrifices joint-line maintenance to improve gap symmetry: A randomized controlled trial comparing gap balancing and measured resection’, The Journal of Arthroplasty, vol. 29, no. 5, 2014, pp. 950–4; Michael J. Barrington, David J. Olive, Craig A. McCutcheon, et al., ‘Stimulating catheters for continuous femoral nerve blockade after total knee arthroplasty: A randomized, controlled, double-blinded trial’, Anesthesia and Analgesia, vol. 106, no. 4, 2008, pp. 1316–21.
3J. Bruce Moseley, Kimberly O’Malley, Nancy J. Petersen, et al., ‘A controlled trial of arthroscopic surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee’, New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 347, no. 2, 2002, pp. 81–8.
4Leonard A. Cobb, George I. Thomas, David H. Dillard, et al., ‘An evaluation of internal-mammary-artery ligation by a double-blind technic’, New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 260, no. 22, 1959, pp. 1115–18. See also Sheryl Stolberg, ‘Sham surgery returns as a research tool’, New York Times, 25 April 1999.
5Rachelle Buchbinder, Richard H. Osborne, Peter R. Ebeling, et al., ‘A randomized trial of vertebroplasty for painful osteoporotic vertebral fractures’, New England Journal of Medicine, vol, 361, no. 6, 2009, pp. 557–68; David F. Kallmes, Bryan A. Comstock, Patrick J. Heagerty, et al., ‘A randomized trial of vertebroplasty for osteoporotic spinal fractures’, New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 361, no. 6, 2009, pp. 569–79.
6Robert E. Gross, Raymond L. Watts, Robert A. Hauser, et al., ‘Intrastriatal transplantation of microcarrier-bound human retinal pigment epithelial cells versus sham surgery in patients with advanced Parkinson’s disease: A double-blind, randomised, controlled trial’, The Lancet Neurology, vol. 10, no. 6, 2011, pp. 509–19.
7Raine Sihvonen, Mika Paavola, Antti Malmivaara, et al., ‘Arthroscopic partial meniscectomy versus sham surgery for a degenerative meniscal tear’, New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 369, no. 26, 2013, pp. 2515–24.
8For example, the procedure was performed approximately 700,000 times in the United States (Sihvonen et al., ‘Arthroscopic partial meniscectomy’), and nearly 50,000 times in Australia (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Admitted Patient Care 2013–14: Australian Hospital Statistics, Health services series no. 60., cat. no. HSE 156, Canberra: AIHW, p. 181).
9See, for example, the surgeons quoted in Pam Belluck, ‘Common knee surgery does very little for some, study suggests’, New York Times, 25 December 2013, p. A16; Joseph Walker, ‘Fake knee surgery as good as real procedure, study finds’, Wall Street Journal, 25 December 2013; Adam Jenney, ‘Operating theatre – camera, lights and action’, Cosmos: The Science of Everything, 17 March 2014.
10J.H. Lubowitz, M.T. Provencher & M.J. Rossi, ‘Could the New England Journal of Medicine be biased against arthroscopic knee surgery? Part 2’, Arthroscopy, vol. 30, no. 6, 2014, pp. 654–5.
11Karolina Wartolowska, Andrew Judge, Sally Hopewell, et al., ‘Use of placebo controls in the evaluation of surgery: systematic review’, British Medical Journal, vol. 348, 2014, g3253. See also Aaron E. Carroll, ‘The placebo effect doesn’t apply just to pills’, New York Times, 6 October 2014.
12As told by Peter Gomes, The Good Life: Truths that Last in Times of Need, New York: HarperCollins, 2002, p. 86.
13Quoted in Franklin G. Miller, ‘Sham surgery: An ethical analysis’, Science and Engineering Ethics, March 2004, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 157–66. On ethical questions, see also Wim Dekkers & Gerard Boer, ‘Sham neurosurgery in patients with Parkinson’s disease: Is it morally acceptable?’ Journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 27, no. 3, 2001, pp. 151–6; Franklin G. Miller & Ted J. Kaptchuk, ‘Sham procedures and the ethics of clinical trials’, Journal of the Royal Society
of Medicine, vol. 97, no. 12, 2004, pp. 576–8.
14Hyeung C. Lim, Sam Adie, Justine M. Naylor & Ian A. Harris, ‘Randomised trial support for orthopaedic surgical procedures’, PLoS ONE, vol. 9, no. 6, 2014, e96745. The study analysed the thirty-two most common orthopaedic procedures, which comprised 95 per cent of all orthopaedic surgeries. Of these, 37 per cent were supported by at least one randomised trial, while 20 per cent were supported by at least one randomised trial that the authors judged to have a ‘low risk of bias’.
15Ian Harris, Surgery, The Ultimate Placebo: A Surgeon Cuts through the Evidence, Sydney: New South Books, 2016, loc. 2035.
16Quoted in David Epstein, ‘When evidence says no, but doctors say yes’, ProPublica, 22 February 2017.
17All of Paré’s quotes are from Ambroise Paré, ‘A surgeon in the field’ in The Portable Renaissance Reader, James Bruce Ross & Mary Martin McLauglin (eds), New York: Viking Penguin, 1981, pp. 558–63.
18John Haygarth, Of the Imagination, as a Cause and as a Cure of Disorders of the Body; Exemplified by Fictitious Tractors, and Epidemical Convulsions, Bath: Crutwell, 1800.
19David Wootton, Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 2.
20Vinay Prasad, quoted in Stephen J. Dubner, ‘Bad Medicine, Part 1: The Story of 98.6’, Freakonomics Radio, 30 November 2016.
21Vinay Prasad, quoted in Stephen J. Dubner, ‘Bad Medicine, Part 1: The Story of 98.6’, Freakonomics Radio, 30 November 2016.
22For the story of Semmelweis, see Ignaz Semmelweis, Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever, University of Wisconsin Press, 1983 [1861]; Rebecca Davis, ‘The doctor who championed hand-washing and briefly saved lives’, NPR, 12 January 2015. Mortality rates in the two clinics fluctuated significantly – the 1 in 10 and 1 in 20 figures are approximate averages for the period before handwashing was introduced.
23Carter, K. Codell & Barbara R. Carter, Childbed Fever. A Scientific Biography of Ignaz Semmelweis, Transaction Publishers, 2005.
24Quoted in John Harley Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, 1820–1885, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014, p. 33.
25Wootton, Bad Medicine, p. 2.
26See for example Gregory L. Armstrong, Laura A. Conn & Robert W. Pinner, ‘Trends in infectious disease mortality in the United States during the 20th century’, Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 281, no. 1, 1999, pp. 61–6; Claire Hooker & Alison Bashford, ‘Diphtheria and Australian public health: Bacteriology and its complex applications, c.1890–1930’. Medical History, vol. 46, 2002, pp 41–64.
27Asbjørn Hróbjartsson, Peter C. Gøtzsche & Christian Gluud, ‘The controlled clinical trial turns 100 years: Fibiger’s trial of serum treatment of diphtheria’, British Medical Journal, vol. 317, no. 7167, 1998, pp. 1243.
28Marcia L. Meldrum, ‘A brief history of the randomized controlled trial: From oranges and lemons to the gold standard’, HematologyOoncology Clinics of North America, vol. 14, no. 4, 2000, pp. 745–60.
29Arun Bhatt, ‘Evolution of clinical research: a history before and beyond James Lind’, Perspectives in clinical research, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, pp. 6–10.
30Marcia Meldrum, ‘“A calculated risk”: The Salk polio vaccine field trials of 1954’, British Medical Journal, vol. 317, no. 7167, 1998, p. 1233.
31Suzanne Junod, ‘FDA and clinical drug trials: A short history’ in Madhu Davies & Faiz Kerimani (eds), A Quick Guide to Clinical Trials, Washington: Bioplan, Inc., 2008, pp. 25–55.
32Archibald Cochrane, Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services, London: Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust, 1972, p. 5.
33Cochrane, Effectiveness and Efficiency, p. 6.
34Cochrane, Effectiveness and Efficiency, p. 5.
35Archibald Cochrane and Max Blythe, One Man’s Medicine: An Autobiography of Professor Archie Cochrane, London: British Medical Journal, 1989, p. 82.
36In 1937, the Massengill Company marketed a drug called ‘elixir sulfanilamide’, which contained the poisonous solvent diethylene glycol. The chemist who devised the drug, Harold Watkins, committed suicide while awaiting trial.
37Michael Hay, David W. Thomas, John L. Craighead, et al., ‘Clinical development success rates for investigational drugs’, Nature biotechnology, vol. 32, no. 1, 2014, pp. 40–51. These estimates are based on the ‘all indications’ data shown in Figure 1, which shows success rates of 64 per cent from Phase 1 to Phase 2, 32 per cent from Phase 2 to Phase 3, and 50 per cent for Phase 3 to approval. See also Joseph A. DiMasi, L. Feldman, A. Seckler & A. Wilson, ‘Trends in risks associated with new drug development: Success rates for investigational drugs’, Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, vol. 87, no. 3, 2010, pp. 272–7.
38For a systematic review, see Asbjørn Hróbjartsson & Peter C. Gøtzsche, ‘Placebo interventions for all clinical conditions’, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2010, CD003974.
39Harris, Surgery, loc. 781.
40The relevant academic studies are summarised in Tessa Cohen, ‘The power of drug color’, The Atlantic, 13 October 2014.
41National Emphysema Treatment Trial Research Group, ‘Patients at high risk of death after lung-volume-reduction surgery’, New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 345, no. 15, 2001, p. 1075.
42R. Brian Haynes, Jayanti Mukherjee, David L. Sackett, et al., ‘Functional status changes following medical or surgical treatment for cerebral ischemia: Results of the extracranial-intracranial bypass study’, Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 257, no. 15, 1987, pp. 2043–6.
43Harris, Surgery, loc. 1669–85.
44Åke Hjalmarson, Sidney Goldstein, Björn Fagerberg, et al., ‘Effects of controlled-release metoprolol on total mortality, hospitalizations, and well-being in patients with heart failure: The Metoprolol CR/XL Randomized Intervention Trial in congestive heart failure (MERIT-HF)’, Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 283, no. 10, 2000, pp. 1295–1302.
45Henry M.P. Boardman, Louise Hartley, Anne Eisinga, et al., ‘Hormone therapy for preventing cardiovascular disease in post-menopausal women’, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2015, Issue 3, 2015, article no. CD002229.
46Quoted in Epstein, ‘When evidence says no’.
47These death figures are from the point at which the first study was published. See CRASH Trial Collaborators, ‘Effect of intravenous corticosteroids on death within fourteen days in 10008 adults with clinically significant head injury (MRC CRASH trial): Randomised placebo-controlled trial’, The Lancet, vol. 364, no. 9442, 2004, pp. 1321–8. A follow-up found death rates of 26 per cent for the treatment group and 22 per cent for the control group: CRASH Trial Collaborators, ‘Final results of MRC CRASH, a randomised placebo-controlled trial of intravenous corticosteroid in adults with head injury—outcomes at 6 months’, The Lancet, vol. 365, no. 9475, 2005, pp. 1957–9.
48Roger Chou, Rongwei Fu, John A. Carrino & Richard A. Deyo, ‘Imaging strategies for low-back pain: Systematic review and meta-analysis’, The Lancet, vol. 373, no. 9662, 2009, pp. 463–72; G. Michael Allan, G. Richard Spooner & Noah Ivers, ‘X-Ray scans for nonspecific low back pain: A nonspecific pain?’ Canadian Family Physician, vol. 58, no. 3, 2012, p. 275.
49Allan, Spooner & Ivers, ‘X-Ray scans’, p. 275.
50Peter C. Gøtzsche & Karsten Juhl Jørgensen, ‘Screening for breast cancer with mammography’, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2013, Issue 6, 2013, article no. CD001877.
51Fritz H. Schröder, Jonas Hugosson, Monique J. Roobol, et al., ‘Screening and prostate cancer mortality: Results of the European randomised study of screening for prostate cancer (ERSPC) at 13 years of follow-up’, The Lancet, vol. 384, no. 9959, 2014, pp. 2027–35. Study participants from France joined later than other nations, so their results were not included in the thirteen-year follow up.
52Goran Bjelakovic, Dimitrinka Nikolova, Lise Lotte Gluud, et al., ‘Mortality in randomized tria
ls of antioxidant supplements for primary and secondary prevention: Systematic review and meta-analysis’, Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 297, no. 8, 2007, pp. 842–57. For an informal discussion of the issue, see Norman Swan, ‘The health report’, ABC Radio National, 5 March 2007. The researchers were at pains to point out that their findings should not be extrapolated to foods that are rich in vitamins, such as fresh fruit and vegetables.
53H.C. Bucher, P. Hengstler, C. Schindler & G.Meier, ‘N-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids in coronary heart disease: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials’, American Journal of Medicine, vol. 112, no. 4, 2002, pp. 298–304.
54E.C. Rizos, E.E. Ntzani, E. Bika, et al., ‘Association between omega-3 fatty acid supplementation and risk of major cardiovascular disease events: A systematic review and meta-analysis’, Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 308, no. 10, 2012, pp. 1024–33.
55See Joseph J. Knapik, David I. Swedler, Tyson L. Grier, et al., ‘Injury reduction effectiveness of selecting running shoes based on plantar shape’, Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, vol. 23, no. 3, 2009, pp. 685–97; B.M. Nigg, J. Baltich, S. Hoerzer & H. Enders, ‘Running shoes and running injuries: Mythbusting and a proposal for two new paradigms: “preferred movement path” and “comfort filter”‘, British Journal of Sports Medicine, vol. 49, 2015, pp. 1290–4; Gretchen Reynolds, ‘Choosing the right running shoes’, New York Times, 5 August 2015.
56Stuart A. Armstrong, Eloise S. Till, Stephen R. Maloney & Gregory A. Harris, ‘Compression socks and functional recovery following marathon running: A randomized controlled trial’, The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, vol. 29, no. 2, 2015, pp. 528–33.
57Jenna B. Gillen, Brian J. Martin, Martin J. MacInnis, et al., ‘Twelve weeks of sprint interval training improves indices of cardiometabolic Health similar to traditional endurance training despite a five-fold lower exercise volume and time commitment’, PloS ONE, vol. 11, no. 4, 2016, e0154075.