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Patients are Vulnerable to False Claims
Healthcare is filled with thousands of claims; most are untrue. Your inability to assess these claims renders you vulnerable. This blog aims to equip you with the basic skills necessary to evaluate healthcare claims for yourself.
The Hierarchy of Medical Evidence
Evaluating a claim is simplified by applying the following basic rules:
A claim is only as strong as the evidence behind it.
All medical evidence falls into a few distinct categories.
These categories can ranked into a hierarchy of reliability.
To evaluate a claim, identify the evidence, and where it falls in the hierarchy.
"It worked for my friend"
Suppose you believe a treatment works because a friend had a good result; this is anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal evidence has been fooling us for thousands of years and sits near the bottom of the hierarchy. Patients get better for other reasons, like placebo effects, concurrent treatments, or they just get better on their own. Unless you can show your anecdote is an exception, or you have additional evidence from categories higher up on the hierarchy, this treatment probably does not work.
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