Weighing the Evidence
With Obamacare and widespread awareness of unsustainable U.S. health spending came a renewed focus on preventive medicine and what's known as evidence-based care: Treatment guidelines and insurance coverage based on systematic reviews of clinical results, eschewing tests or treatments that are expensive but offer limited clinical benefit.
If this sounds simple in theory, the reality is far messier. Physicians and scientists often disagree over how evidence should be interpreted, and the outcome is ultimately a cost-benefit analysis in which some suffering is simply too costly to avoid. Bitter fights over prostate cancer screening and breast cancer exams foreshadow battles to come.
Image: Hans Splinter/Flickr