If you have a selection of magazines in your practice’s waiting room, be sure to include the May 29, 2006, issue of BusinessWeek among them. The cover story, titled, “Medical Guesswork,” is a searing indictment of the medical profession. The article states that little or no evidence exists that many widely used medical treatments and procedures actually work better than various cheaper alternatives.

The article is actually about David Eddy, MD, a heart surgeon turned mathematician and health care economist who has spent his career exposing medicine’s dark secret: The practice of medicine is more guesswork than science. “The problem is that we don’t know what we’re doing,” Eddy is quoted as saying.

Thinking that the medical profession should practice evidence-based medicine, Eddy developed a computer model that seeks to duplicate, in equations, the actual biology of a patient’s body, and make treatment recommendations based on that model. The model allows patients to have an “imaginary twin” on a computer program.

But much of the approximately 4,000-word BusinessWeek article discusses the lack of evidence in medicine, and includes a statistic that only 15% of what medical doctors do is backed by hard evidence. For example, one of Eddy’s studies won an award by showing that annual chest x-rays and yearly Pap smears for women at low risk for cervical cancer were a waste of resources. Based on his results, the American Cancer Society changed its guidelines, according to the article.

Millions of people trust MDs completely to diagnose their illnesses accurately and to provide quality treatment. But it’s sad to read that MDs are, in a lot of cases, just guessing, or in other cases, recommending certain treatments only because the treatments benefit the practitioners financially.

Now, I don’t mean to be overly critical of the medical profession. Many MDs refer patients to chiropractors, and Chiropractic Products has featured chiropractors who work in hospitals with MDs and even partner with MDs in their multidisciplinary practices. But although it was unfortunate that the BusinessWeek article failed to mention chiropractic—the American Chiropractic Association later wrote a letter to BusinessWeek to call attention to the omission—the article continues the positive trend of increased public perception of alternatives to conventional medicine.

The article is sure to get people thinking about alternative health care. Although I have written in the past about mainstream media bias toward conventional medicine, media reports abound on the risk of complications from various drugs, and the number of articles informing the public about alternatives to conventional health care have been on the increase. Momentum is swinging in the direction of alternative health care.