Comments by "Craxin01" (@Craxin01) on "How "advanced" is medicine, anyway? | Anupam Jena interview" video.

In depth medical studies are hard to do with human beings. It requires to do things that are unethical on a social level. Looking into the effects of cigarettes on pregnancy for example, in a medical study, you'd need to take one group and have them smoke a lot, another smoke a moderate amount, a third smoking very little, and a control group smoking nothing. You're intentionally putting a fetus in harm's way in order to then study the resulting baby. Sometimes, what we can only really do is a metanalysis, looking at the medical records of many and compare. Is it perfect? No, but it's better than intentionally harming real people.
4