Surgery, the Ultimate Placebo
One of my favourite stories along these lines (this is from Ben Goldacre&#x27;s great book Bad Science, and may be slightly misremembered in parts) is about Archie Cochrane, who gave his name to the Cochrane Collaboration, an organisation who rigorously analyse the evidence for medical treatments, even &quot;obvious&quot; ones. He set it up after being a Japanese prisoner of war, where he had to make decisions about medical treatment in the face of extremely callous treatment by the Japanese officers. They were often decisions you only hear about in philosophical games - e.g. do you save one person&#x27;s life or the sight of ten people - and he realised that much of his medical training was not based on proper evidence.<p>In the UK in the 1970s, hospitals started equipping expensive cardiac units, specifically designed for the treatment of heart attacks, full of expensive medical equipment (and if HN doesn&#x27;t mind a good-natured tease, cardiac surgeons don&#x27;t exactly shun the heroic mode of medicine). Part-way through a Cochrane study of their effectiveness, the data was pointing to survival rates being slightly higher when people were treated at home rather than in the cardiac units, but the results were not statistically significant. He decided to play a trick and annouced at an interim meeting that the data were pointing the opposite way - that treatment in cardiac units showed slightly higher survival rates, but were still not statistically significant. The doctors in the meeting were extremely angry that he insisted that the study should go on because the results were not statistically significant and therefore no conclusions could be drawn from the data. It wasn&#x27;t until later in the meeting that he came clean, and told them that the data were pointing in the other direction. Funnily enough, none of the doctors still called for the study to be halted early in the face of identical evidence, just pointing to a different conclusion.