When a pharmaceutical company that uses tertiary packaging services has a drug that is widely used for treatment of a condition, it can become very lucrative – but as new drugs are developed, this can knock older drugs out of use. However, in the case of a recent study, instead of new pharmaceutical rendering older treatments obsolete, it has been found that hundreds of common medical procedures are actually ineffective.

According to Forbes, a team of researchers have been looking at 3,000 articles from leading medical journals and have found as many as 400 instances where the treatment was of little or no use, or were in need of medical reversal.

Of course, when any new drug or treatment is brought to market, it has to undergo clinical trials, in which a control group is used to more accurately measure the effects on the subjects. In a double-blind trial, the researchers don’t know either, helping to eliminate any bias in the reporting. However, one issue with these trials is that they’re not always completely airtight – conditions may not be ideal and cause flaws, whether that’s too small a group of subjects or not enough genetic variation in the subjects. Or, it has even been seen that ethical misconduct has occurred, where a trial is under pressure to achieve results for economic reasons.

It may be that these results are unable to be achieved again, however, even some trials not conducted in ideal conditions have allowed treatments to start to enter the medical profession.

These treatments can be called into question for a number of reasons – in this study, it was found that 33 per cent were proved ineffective by later trials, while 20 per cent came more anecdotally from a procedure.

The aim of this study was to help rid some of these low-value medical treatments from the medical world, ensuring that was cheaper, more effective treatments are available, they are being used. The cost of these treatments can be staggering. In the US, a study from 2014 of 26 low-value treatments given to older patients via Medicare was found to have cost as much as $8.5 billion, of which 25 per cent were found later to ineffective.

In terms of the treatments that didn’t work, treatments for cardiovascular diseases made up 20 per cent of the overall findings. Preventative medicine and critical care treatment also featured highly.

According to Forbes, some of the treatments proven ineffective include: “The use of sertraline and mirtazapine in those with Alzheimer’s disease; Vitamin A supplementation among neonates at birth; The use of Zopiclone, a non-benzodiazepine sleeping pill, for insomnia; and epidural glucocorticoid injections for lumbar stenosis” as a small cross-section of many varied treatments and pharmaceuticals.

In order to prevent so many ineffective treatments being taken up by the medical profession, experts quoted to say that the need for regular random clinical trials is necessary for both new and established treatments. They also say that more attention should be given to testing novel treatments before they are permitted to become widespread, as both patients and doctors are less prone to abandon it.