RCTs: The Foundational Flaw of Modern Medicine? - Cheng

Written by Dr. Richard Z. Cheng,

Key Points

RCTs were designed for drugs, not nutrition or lifestyle, so they often fail to capture the complexity of real-world health and individualized biology.
Human health is multifactorial, and reductionist RCT methods oversimplify diverse genetics, nutrient status, and environmental factors—producing results that may not reflect real clinical outcomes.
Statistical significance is prioritized over meaningful patient improvement, allowing marginal drug benefits to be celebrated while dismissing real-world successes of nutrition-based therapies.
Many important health interventions (vitamin D, vitamin C, niacin, ketogenic diets, detoxification) cannot be properly evaluated using traditional RCT methods, making RCT dogma a barrier to truly evidence-based, patient-centered medicine.