A new book critiques medicine

In other words, even if vaccines did cause autism (which they do not) it would still be imperative to use them. The alternative to widespread vaccination is much worse.

> Whereas between 1978 and 1981 only nine product-liability suits were filed against DTP manufactur-ers, by the mid-1980’s the suits numbered more than 200 each year.6 This destabilized the DTP vaccine market, causing two of the three domestic manufacturers to with-draw; and the remaining manufacturer, Lederle Laborato-ries, estimated that its potential tort liability exceeded itsannual sales by a factor of 200.

So did vaccines suddenly become dangerous after 1980? Or did people develop irrational fear?

If you read further it plainly says that the "National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program" was started to mollify these anti-vaxxers to try to get them to vaccinate:

> significant number of parents were already declining vaccination for their children,10 and concerns about compensation threatened to depress vaccination rates even further.11 This was a source of concern to public health officials, since vaccines are effective in preventing out-breaks of disease only if a large percentage of the population is vaccinated.12

> To stabilize the vaccine market and facilitate compensa-tion, Congress enacted the NCVIA in 1986.

Please do better than this, regardless of how wrong or ignorant another comment is. Your post gives us no information other than about yourself.

If you know more, please share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. Please don't just name-call. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

So yes, scientific medicine definitely has huge lacunae. Given the relative slowness of progress in understanding complex systems science has had in general, they'll be there for a long to come. But it's not as if there's some other candidate 'system' that has a better understanding.

Startups have been going at this problem for years and years already and have had the data. I've worked at them. You know what the goal of most of those startups was? To make money. Patients were a means to an end. If they helped people, it was a thing that happened but not the actual goal.

See, actually trying to help patients and do so responsibly and not just cause a bigger mess is hard. Medicine is complicated, people are complicated, the health system is complicated. Easier to just ignore all that, make some money and sell out before people realize all you did was funnel some money around.

>Once all of this data becomes available, it will be obvious how worthless and expensive most medical treatments really are.

There's plenty of existing literature that notes various medical treatments are worthless. Yet they still happen and are still prescribed and are still paid for. Knowledge doesn't change behavior.

>HIPAA laws are hiding patient outcomes and holding this whole sham afloat.

You can easily get medical billing data for a massive percentage of the US population which includes doctors, dates, procedures, diagnoses and aggregated costs. De-identified but that doesn't matter for these sorts of things.

edit: Also, what is probably the biggest hurdle for health care startups isn't data. It's the fact that AB testing, the cornerstone of how every tech company iterates, is considered unethical except in very constrained forms. Something about there being a difference between crashing the web page of 1% of your customers versus literally killing 1% of your customers.