, Columnist
Reversal on Daily Aspirin Shows Medicine’s Weak Spot
When doctors recommend untested remedies to healthy patients, they sometimes get the “better safe than sorry” equation mixed up.
Never mind.
Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
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There’s a pattern to medical reversals that can help explain this week’s seeming U-turn on that age-old advice to take an aspirin a day to prevent heart attacks and strokes. Evidence had actually been building for some time that this might do a lot of people more harm than good.
This latest news shouldn’t serve as an indictment of medicine but as a warning to be skeptical of certain kinds of recommendations. That includes any medical intervention aimed at healthy people — especially treatments that aren’t backed by multiple controlled clinical trials.