Why is Medicine so Primitive?

The practice of modern medicine is surprisingly primitive.  My doctor only recently started to provide printed prescriptions instead of the usual scrawl.  Incorrectly filled prescriptions can be serious and computer printed prescriptions are an obvious response yet even today only one in four physicians use some form of electronic health records and only one in ten really use electronic records to follow a patient’s entire history.  My credit card company knows far more about my shopping history than my physician knows about my medical history.

Medicine is primitive in another way.  The number of treatment regimes supported only by tradition and authority is very high.  Here’s a recent example:

For the past 30 years or so, doctors have routinely given pregnant
women intravenous infusions of magnesium sulfate to halt contractions
that can lead to premature labor.

…[a] team reviewed 23 clinical trials worldwide involving 2,000 women who
had received the drug to quell contractions. They found that it did not
reduce preterm labor and that more babies died when their mothers took
the drug than in a control group where the mothers had not been given
it.

…Grimes and Nanda estimate that about 120,000 American women receive mag
sulfate each year for premature contractions, and they say some
evidence suggests it may be associated with 1,900 to 4,800 fetal deaths
annually in the United States.

This would be a shocker except for the fact that stories like this are common – by some accounts a majority of medical procedures are not supported by serious scientific evidence.  Indeed, what are we to make of a profession where evidence-based medicine is only a recent and still far from accepted movement?

Why is medicine so primitive?  One reason is that medicine is the largest area of the economy still dominated by artisanal production.  I will be blunt: We need assembly line medicine, medicine that is routinized, marked and measured. As I have argued before I would much prefer to be diagnosed by a computerized expert system than by a physician. The HMOs, Kaiser in particular, have done good work on measuring the effectiveness of different procedures but much more needs to be done to bring medicine into the twentieth century let alone the twenty first.