Skip to content

“Hope and Hype Outpace Proven Treatments”: Sounds Familiar?

Last updated on September 5, 2011

You would think this New York Times article is about aid and development, especially when glancing at the subtitles (“A Theory Becomes a Fad,” “Conflicting Studies,” “The Next Big Thing”), but I guarantee it’s not:

“But now researchers are questioning many of the procedures, including new ones that often have no rigorous studies to back them up. ‘Everyone wants to get into sports medicine,’ said Dr. James Andrews, a sports medicine orthopedist in Gulf Breeze, Fla., and president-elect of the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine.

Doctors love the specialty and can join it with as little as a year of training after their residency, as compared with the more typical two to four years for other specialty training. They see a large group of patients eager for treatment, ranging from competitive athletes to casual exercisers to retirees spending their time on the golf course or tennis court.

All this leads Dr. Andrew Green, a shoulder orthopedist at Brown University, to ask, ‘Is sports medicine a science, something that really pays attention to evidence? Or is it a boutique industry where you have a product and sell it?'”

Is anyone else reminded of microfinance circa 2006?