This Man’s Simple System Could Transform American Medicine

...Developed by a trio of epidemiologists back in the ’80s, the NNT describes how many people would need to take a drug for one person to benefit. (The NNT for antibiotics in a case of acute bronchitis is effectively infinity, because the medicine is no better at curing the illness than a placebo.)

Consider a couple other examples: If your kid is throwing up and you take her to the hospital, she might get a drug called Zofran. The NNT for that is 5, meaning that only five kids need to take Zofran for one of them to stop throwing up. And if you look at Zofran’s “number needed to harm” (the number of people who would need to take a drug for one to have a bad side effect) the answer is … well, there really isn’t one—no one has a significant side effect.

...It’s unfortunate, then, that the NNT is not a statistic that’s routinely conveyed to either doctors or patients. But you can look it up on a site that you’ve probably never heard of: TheNNT.com. Started by David Newman, a director of clinical research at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai hospital, the site’s dozens of contributors analyze the available studies, crunch the numbers on benefits and harms, and then post the results...