Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by throw_pm23 1230 days ago
In the medical field, cases of interventions being harmful are not rare, and entire classes of interventions have been reconsidered in light of evidence.
1 comments

There's several billion medical intervention of all kinds every year, harmful interventions do exist but they are only a very tiny fraction of the total.
Yes, but there are _kinds of_ interventions which turned out to be systematically harmful. For instance, in most developed countries it was a policy to thoroughly wash newborns, until they realized it was harmful.
True, but if you look at the entire collection of kinds of intervention you'll find that the harmful kinds are also a small fraction of them.