Medical advancements should not wait 17 years before being used - opinion

As someone who is not a doctor, I am writing this article to get some clarification from those of you who are. As much as I want everyone to read this, I am asking you, the medical professionals, to please respond to what I write here. Help me out.

I am trying to understand, but I don’t. I know that according to research cited by Dr. Michael Greger, MD, it can take up to 17 years for discoveries in scientific research to make it to clinical practice. Well, I don’t want to wait that long, so let’s have a conversation.

I do my best to try to keep up with the latest findings related to healthcare and particularly preventative care. As I myself have gone through a few health challenges as of late, I pay a great deal of attention to my health and fitness. So, the first study that caught my attention is close to home, but certainly affects a large segment of the population.

What this is saying is that the usual protocol of dual antiplatelet therapy for a year, followed by only aspirin, is not necessary. The patient can go down to their one blood thinner after a month, something like Plavix, and have the same outcome without the risk of GI bleeding.

Has anyone paid attention to this and changed how they treat their patients? I conducted a survey of three cardiologists. One said he is a big believer in the dual therapy and isn’t going to change, one said he has cut the aspirin down to six months, and third one didn’t respond. A year from now I am relatively certain that very few cardiologists will change what they are doing now. For some reason, we like to stick with the status quo even when there is evidence against it.

At the same conference of the ESC, two new randomized trials and a meta-analysis showed that beta-blockers following a myocardial infarction offer only a modest benefit in contemporary practice when patients have an ejection fraction of at least 40%. Until now it has been common practice to prescribe this drug automatically after a heart attack. But we now see they may not be so beneficial. Take it anyway? Well, it is a drug that causes fatigue, a cold and tired feeling later in the day, and possible sleep disruption, among other things. Will they now think twice about prescribing the drug? Probably not.

In 2016, the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care pretty much said it doesn’t. A newer randomized controlled study looking at 84,000 people showed there was no statistically significant reduction in CRC-related deaths. There was benefit in colon cancer prevention. Again, however, we have to weigh benefit and risk.

So what do they do in Canada and many European countries? A less invasive and safer sigmoidoscopy with a yearly blood occult test. The outcomes are not really very different, and people are more likely to be compliant with this second option. Things won’t change though. The colonoscopy industry in 2024 was $2.3 billion.

These are three examples of how the norm doesn’t coincide with what the latest research says. There is certainly a lot more. So, I ask again: When we know the research tells us A, why do we insist on continuing to do B? To my doctor friends – please clarify this for us.

Drugs are certainly a necessity much of the time, as are certain procedures and surgery. However, we live in a time when we have more drugs, more procedures, more sophisticated surgical techniques, and certainly we have more ways to take images of the insides of our bodies, than ever before. It makes one pause and think – we also see a rising rate of disease and sickness, the likes we have also never had before.

It’s time to pay attention and not just do things because we have always done them that way. Let’s pay attention to the latest in research and not wait 17 years to implement the findings. That applies to research in terms of applying lifestyle to mainstream medical practice as well. Then we will certainly “add hours to your days, days to your years and years to your lives.”