That was my worry as well, especially with how misrepresented the cited evidence was.

I’m very supportive of the intellectually curious looking at evidence for themselves, but directly evaluating primary medical research is challenging even for a trained academic physician. Like in all fields, a lot of the papers published (even in reputable journals like NEJM and JAMA) are biased/flawed.

As one example, there was a landmark trial 40 years ago that claimed screening mammography doesn’t improve outcomes which was discordant with other smaller trials and mostly ignored by the medical community. That study was recently exposed as borderline fraudulent[0][1]. Had we stopped screening undoubtedly many women would have died of breast cancer. Those of us involved in colorectal cancer screening/diagnosis are well aware of the Nordic trial, but it is not practice changing.

For the curious HN reader wondering why we do some of the things we do in medicine, my strong recommendation is to refer to the USPSTF or Google “society guideline on [disease/intervention]” where you will always find an excellent summary of the evidence, strength of recommendation, rationale and limitations written by domain experts in that specific area rather than risk misinterpreting a single study, it’s how physicians practice too.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/jbi/article/4/2/108/6555324?login=f...

[1] https://academic.oup.com/jbi/article/4/2/135/6555326?login=f...