Why is overtreatment of infertility so rampant?

Lots of Indian IVF doctors put their patients on anti-TB medicines . While some of them will do tests to decide which patients to treat with these toxic medicines, others routinely put all their patients on the drugs, irrespective of whether they actually have TB or not. Thus, in the Ashvini Hospital of the Indian Navy in Mumbai, all infertile patients are put on anti-TB treatment " empirically".I have often wondered why medical treatments which are completely unproven have become so prevalent. In this case, it's obviously not driven by financial considerations - after all, it's not as if the Navy doctor makes more money by prescribing this treatment !The truth is that overtreatment is rampant because of a common fallacy which it's very easy for doctors to fall prey to. They suffer from skilled ignorance and unawareness. This is the fallacy of expertise , where they don't know what they don't knowIf you give unnecessary treatment to infertile women who don't need it, lots of them are going to get pregnant. The point of course, is they would have got pregnant whether you'd put them on the anti-TB medicines or not, but you have no way of judging that.Since all human beings are biased , and because doctors don't carry out controlled clinical trials, they naturally start believing that it was the anti-TB treatment which they prescribed which caused the patient to get pregnant. Patients also contribute to this misconception, because when they get pregnant , they go back to th...
Source: Dr.Malpani's Blog - Category: Reproduction Medicine Source Type: blogs