It seems many big health advances rarely involve new medicines. Much the same applies to the rest of life too.

According to a study on the massive improvement in survival rates in cases of childhood leukemia, reported by Darshak Sanghavi (“Old Drugs, New Tricks”), it wasn’t some newly discovered drug or a magical genetic therapy that did the trick. It was due mostly to small but consistent improvements in the use of old drugs.

Research shows that the most successful areas of medicine don’t place too much emphasis on the latest miracle cures. Instead, they do the slow, boring work of reviewing thousands of published studies and clinical trials, imitating what works and adding their own experience and ideas to the growing body of knowledge available.

Sanghavi writes:

Too often, medical advances get advertised as the work of swashbuckling doctors and patients who take big risks against big odds and seize miraculous results with new treatments taken straight from the lab. That narrative is misleading. As with pediatric leukemia, the reality often is far less dramatic but no less impressive, and therein lie critical lessons for patients with many chronic, tough-to-treat diseases like asthma, attention-deficit disorder, and obesity.

While the article is about medicine, I suspect that this approach is the bedrock of innovation and progress in most areas of life. No one loses weight and keeps it off without a regular, sustained change in eating habits and lifestyle. Learning takes persistence and tenacity more than brilliant intelligence.

We all like a big success story and novelty is irresistibly attractive to the media at large, but small-scale, incremental improvements — while not the stuff likely to hit the headlines — may well be more effective in the long term.

Realizing this also a cause for strong optimism. As the article points out:

Without discounting the importance of new research, paying more attention to incremental improvement refocuses how we think about medical progress. And it’s an upbeat shift in viewpoint, indicating that we already have the tools to cure many diseases and improve many lives. We just need to figure out how to use them better.

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