Some links to help in deciding whether a medical treatment has any validity.
Trusted evidence. Informed decisions. Better health.
Cochrane is a global independent network of health practitioners, researchers, patient advocates and others, responding to the challenge of making the vast amounts of evidence generated through research useful for informing decisions about health. We are a not-for-profit organisation with collaborators from over 120 countries working together to produce credible, accessible health information that is free from commercial sponsorship and other conflicts of interest.
The Number-Needed-to-Treat. Quick summaries of evidence-based medicine.
We are a group of physicians that have developed a framework and rating
system to evaluate therapies based on their patient-important benefits
and harms as well as a system to evaluate diagnostics by patient sign,
symptom, lab test or study.
We only use the highest quality, evidence-based studies (frequently,
but not always
Cochrane Reviews)
, and we accept no outside funding
or advertisements.
Fighting Pseudoscience.
A growing lobby is Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM ) providers, who have discovered a new opportunity to extract even more money from patients than they do already. They want the government to force insurance providers to pay for quack treatments, regardless of whether or not the treatments work. Any attempt to require evidence, they argue, amounts to discrimination.
Alternative Medicine is the antithesis of evidence based medicine.