We are in a crisis. It is a health misinformation crisis, and relatively few people know about it even though it is well-documented. It is a crisis of tragic proportions causing hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths and a multitude of other harms to patients. It is further characterized by incredible waste and missed opportunities for optimal care. And importantly, it results in the near impossibility for patients to be sufficiently informed of what they need to know to provide truly informed consent to medical interventions.

A major contributor to this crisis is a lack of understanding by most medical professionals of a few simple facts about medical science.  This has occurred due to problems in the training of health care professionals, with the resulting outcome that few professionals involved in medical decision-making understand what is required for information to be trustable and useful when making decisions about medical interventions.

The simple answer is that the solution requires the use of reliable and useful medical science. However, the reality is that much published medical science is not reliable, is misleading or is reported so poorly that it is not possible to determine its reliability. This problem is rampant and pervasive. We are not protected by the best medical journals, the most prestigious investigators and institutions or the FDA.

And most medical decision-making professionals are not aware that there is a crisis at all.

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