Christie Aschwanden has written an excellent article on how resistance to corrective information hinders progress in health and medicine for Miller-McCune. Here’s a sample:

A surprising number of medical practices have never been rigorously tested to find out if they really work. Even where evidence points to the most effective treatment for a particular condition, the information is not always put into practice. “The First National Report Card on Quality of Health Care in America,” published by the Rand Corporation in 2006, found that, overall, Americans received only about half of the care recommended by national guidelines.

A $1.1 billion provision in the federal stimulus package aims to address the issue by providing funds for comparative effectiveness research to find the most effective treatments for common conditions. But these efforts are bound to face resistance when they challenge existing beliefs. As Nieman and countless other researchers have learned, new evidence often meets with dismay or even outrage when it shifts recommendations away from popular practices or debunks widely held beliefs. For evidence-based medicine to succeed, its practitioners must learn to present evidence in a way that resonates.

Or, to borrow a phrase from politics, it’s not the evidence, stupid — it’s the narrative.

The problems in health are at least as bad as they are in politics (and maybe more so). It’s a very difficult issue.

(Disclosure: I’m quoted in the article, which also discusses my paper on resistance to corrections with Jason Reifler.)