My response to Richard’s post on Marcia Angell’s piece on psychoactive drugs (attached below):

Medicine often focuses on diagnosis, where treatment is an afterthought. This is probably because of the historical success of antibiotics. There was a good book on this, called “Manufacturing Depression.”

The focus on diagnosis distracts us from optimizing for health (which depends on how well treatment works).  

In my opinion, this is not as much low integrity as it is misguided. What’s described in the linked article, on influential providers who acted in the best interest of drug companies rather than their patients, is egregious (likely due to greed). At the level of the other healthcare providers, though, it’s probably more about good intentions and misinformation than integrity.    

Misinformation is tough in medicine, because we have to trust our experts. There is too much medical knowledge to derive it all from first principles. This leads to groupthink.

It makes it tough when the experts fail us. 

It is very important for statisticians to weigh in, since they can counterbalance the “experts.”