Some recent items related to health matters.
In his 2018 book, the philosopher of science, Jacob Stegenga defends the view "that we should have little confidence in the effectiveness of medical interventions."
Here are a few of the reasons for adopting a position of medical nihilism: First, there are a set of problems associated with research methodologies and trial design. The 'gold standards' of evidence based medicine, randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and meta-analyses, whilst invaluable for testing the effectiveness of medical interventions, can also be subject to poor design and execution through inept practices and explicit and implicit biases. Practices such as outcome switching, p-hacking and selective publication, have been well-documented and result in more 'positive' results than is warranted. For instance, in clinical trials, many different outcomes are measured. The problem with this is that, just by chance, at least some of these outcomes are likely to show improvement. To avoid capitalising on this chance, researchers publish a protocol of the trial before it's even conducted, identifying which outcome counts as the definitive test. However, researchers sometimes do not stick to these commitments, and engage in outcome switching: they report outcomes which did show an effect, rather than those that were pre-specified. This significantly increases the likelihood of reporting effects which occurred by chance, rather than through some reliable consequence of the intervention. P-hacking similarly involves the selection of a statistical approach to analysing outcome data based on its a posteriori ability to provide statistically significant results rather than on it's a priori appropriateness. Finally, selective publication is a cruder means to a similar end: conduct several trials but only publish those which show strongest support for the treatment.
It's much less scientific-and more prone to gratuitous procedures-than you may think.
The Cochrane organization, a highly respected arbiter of evidence-based medicine, has conducted systematic reviews of oral-health studies since 1999. In these reviews, researchers analyze the scientific literature on a particular dental intervention, focusing on the most rigorous and well-designed studies. In some cases, the findings clearly justify a given procedure. For example, dental sealants-liquid plastics painted onto the pits and grooves of teeth like nail polish-reduce tooth decay in children and have no known risks. (Despite this, they are not widely used, possibly because they are too simple and inexpensive to earn dentists much money.) But most of the Cochrane reviews reach one of two disheartening conclusions: Either the available evidence fails to confirm the purported benefits of a given dental intervention, or there is simply not enough research to say anything substantive one way or another.