Ending Medical Reversal

Why medicine adopts ineffective or harmful medical practices only to abandon them—sometimes too late.Medications such as Vioxx and procedures such as vertebroplasty for back pain are among the med ...

Why medicine adopts ineffective or harmful medical practices only to abandon them—sometimes too late.Medications such as Vioxx and procedures such as vertebroplasty for back pain are among the medical "advances" that turned out to be dangerous or useless. What Dr. Vinayak K. Prasad and Dr. Adam S. Cifu call medical reversal happens when doctors start using a medication, procedure, or diagnostic tool without a robust evidence base—and then stop using it when it is found not to help, or even to harm, patients.In Ending Medical Reversal, Drs. Prasad and Cifu narrate fascinating stories from every