WHY REAL COMMON SENSE MEDICINE?

We are all barraged by an astronomic number of reports about medical issues in the news, on the internet, and from every other source imaginable.  On top of that, we are inundated by countless advertisements touting some new and invariably expensive remedy that they claim to be a game changer for whatever ailment you may have.

These reports loudly trumpet multiple recommendations, supposed facts, and medical studies of variable validity.  These are frequently contradictory, confusing, and often seem nonsensical.  When people come to my office, they often ask me to help make sense of all this, and they commonly want to know why they are not getting the latest drug or if they need to change something they are doing in their daily life. 

One of my aims in these posts is to try to help wade through these reports, analyze the data we can find, sort out what we really do know from what we really do not, and try to make some sense of them. 

One common thread seems to be that in most cases we do best if, after we have examined the facts they present, we usually have to step back and look at the answer they propound in the context of everything else we believe to be true.  We then need to ask, “Does this make sense?” 

Yes, I think common sense is precisely what is missing in all too many of these reports on TV or on the internet.  I hope to be able to add my take on them by applying my concept of Real Common Sense to them.

So, how does Real Common Sense work?  We have all experienced the World, and we have all tried a variety of treatments on ourselves for whatever ailed us at the time.  Sometimes they worked, and sometimes they didn’t.  Either way, we have that experience to draw on, and the aggregate of our experiences over many years gives us good basis to ask, “Does this new recommendation make sense?”

One way I will try to apply Real Common Sense is to look some of the studies being used to get you to do something new, whether it be taking certain medications, following certain diet, taking certain supplements, or altering your life routine.  I will try to go beneath the conclusions in the headlines, and look at what we can find in the data that was used to come to this conclusion.  We will need to use Real Common Sense to ask if the data really adequately supports the conclusion, and whether the group of people studied is really similar to you.  For example, a study of elderly nursing home residents may lead to a conclusion that simply does not apply to most normal active younger people.  Real Common Sense.   I will discuss this study in a later post.

Similarly, whenever a report comes to a conclusion that I would not have expected, I like to ask, “What is the mechanism?  How does this work given what we know of human anatomy and physiology?”  If the authors cannot explain how the result they report occurs, I am very suspicious.  An effect without a rational cause means one of two things. First, it may be true, in which case they have discovered something new about the human body that needs to be studied further.  This could be extremely important, but it is extremely rare.  More often, no new science has been discovered.  The results are often a statistical association that should not have been used to recommend you change your life.  Real Common Sense tells us that if there is a real effect, there has to be some scientifically valid mechanism that causes it.  Otherwise, beware. 

What we really need is Real Common Sense.  Welcome.