Atul Gawande, the surgeon-researcher-public health activist in his recent essay describes the current medical practice so succinctly : “Millions of people are receiving drugs that arenโt helping them, operations that arenโt going to make them better, and scans and tests that do nothing beneficial for them, and often cause harm.”
Once a test or a procedure or an operation becomes popular, it is difficult to dislodge them. And the hospitals offer hundreds of such interventions, based on rituals and anecdotes. They have no proven value. Indeed many of them are harmful. Time that the medical community decides to treat patients on solid scientific evidence, and not on tradition.