>>12361517Most common conditions have gold-standard treatments that are backed up by considerable evidence. That isn't always the case though. Some rare conditions like Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and some common ones like macular degeneration that have no effective treatments. And there are many diseases whose best treatment has limited efficacy, like pancreatic cancer or major depression. But these are in the minority of cases of serious conditions.
Every drug has been put through a fairly rigorous review process. Drugs are sometimes retracted if side effects are discovered after the fact, but hardly ever if they are found to be ineffective, because then they never would have been approved in the first place. It is heavily in the interest of the pharmaceutical companies not to release ineffective medicine, not only because of the damage that would do to their image, but because recalling a drug is very expensive.
Note that the "weird" serious conditions you are talking about are not weird at all to the people who have them. If a leukemia drug was not effective, doctors would notice very quickly. For many conditions, it is immediately apparent that a drug is working. Certainly when my insulin doesn't work (e.g. got too warm), I get sick within hours. Most diseases aren't super common. But just because you haven't heard of Hashimoto's thyroiditis or whatever doesn't mean it's somehow flying under the radar.
>>12361578It depends on the condition. If that were always true, homeopathic products wouldn't sell so well.
