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David H. Spodick, MD, DSc
St Vincent Hospital University of Massachusetts Medical School Worcester

JAMA. 1984;251(18):2348.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

Dr Lundberg's editorial entitled "Why Not Scientific Administration?" is right on the mark. As a long-time advocate of controlled clinical trials of therapy and diagnosis,^1-4 I found it easy to appreciate Dr Lundberg's appropriate extension of the principle in his concise, pithy essay.

Too often, courses of action have been advocated, promulgated, and implemented without an appropriate test of their cost-benefit characteristics, let alone whether there is any benefit at all over existing or alternate approaches. Dr Lundberg correctly cites the federal plunge into this area with diagnostic-related groups. An analogous situation is in undergraduate education, where all kinds of experiments were inflicted on students without prior testing (where, for example, is the new math?).

Unfortunately, the current stampede to unconsidered and ill-considered regulations was not concocted by well-meaning advanced social thinkers in Washington. It is receiving an unusual push from corporate private enterprise with its . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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