It’s often the case that a single clinic has a great medical treatment that doesn’t spread to the rest of the world.
My favorite example is the Stone Clinic, which for decades has been treating osteoarthritis successfully by regrowing cartilage with stem cells from bone marrow. Extrapolated from their results, if the entire US used the Stone Clinic’s methods, 98% of knee replacement surgeries would be unnecessary. But, for one reason or another, getting widespread adoption is really hard.
Stephen Badylak’s clinic regularly regrows organs, but again, this hasn’t scaled nationwide.
Francis Levi has found that chemotherapy has half the side effects and double the potency if you give it at night, when cancer cells are dividing but healthy cells have a slowed cell cycle. “Chronotherapy” for cancer is pretty much only available at his hospital.
As a patient, you could probably do much better than average by finding the clinic that does that one really good thing and going there.
I would be very interested in reading, say a blog post (or series thereof) exploring why this happens (and, if remotely possible, directing motivated individuals towards ways to support faster adoption of successful treatments).
Doing your own research, though it might take a while. There’s not a centralized database or anything. Skimming Google Scholar for exceptional results on the outcome measure you care about, and then looking up the institution where the study was done, is one way to find it.
It’s often the case that a single clinic has a great medical treatment that doesn’t spread to the rest of the world.
My favorite example is the Stone Clinic, which for decades has been treating osteoarthritis successfully by regrowing cartilage with stem cells from bone marrow. Extrapolated from their results, if the entire US used the Stone Clinic’s methods, 98% of knee replacement surgeries would be unnecessary. But, for one reason or another, getting widespread adoption is really hard.
Stephen Badylak’s clinic regularly regrows organs, but again, this hasn’t scaled nationwide.
Francis Levi has found that chemotherapy has half the side effects and double the potency if you give it at night, when cancer cells are dividing but healthy cells have a slowed cell cycle. “Chronotherapy” for cancer is pretty much only available at his hospital.
As a patient, you could probably do much better than average by finding the clinic that does that one really good thing and going there.
I would be very interested in reading, say a blog post (or series thereof) exploring why this happens (and, if remotely possible, directing motivated individuals towards ways to support faster adoption of successful treatments).
Is there a way to find that clinic, given that you know you have condition X?
Doing your own research, though it might take a while. There’s not a centralized database or anything. Skimming Google Scholar for exceptional results on the outcome measure you care about, and then looking up the institution where the study was done, is one way to find it.