Another research group in Egypt just published a paper showing that Blastocystis infection kills laboratory animals in experimental infection. Despite this, in the United States, we have now gone 15 years without the NIH approving a single study to help treat patients with this disease.
The NIH claims that "experts disagree" so they will take no action.
In engineering, when you do a scientific experiment, and it yields a result, you then follow what that result does. And you often don't do anything without doing an experiment. Engineers hinge their futures on scientific experiments every day. Companies that don't do the right experiments go out of business. This isn't true in medicine - people will pay just as much for useless treatments and information as they will for ones that work.
Engineering failures are often spectacular, and make headline news. When there was a minor flaw in an Intel microprocessor, that made the headlines. A defect in the antenna on the Iphone-4 is headline news as well, and prompted immediate congressional intervention.
Medical failures often get ignored. Medicine is different. In medicine, you do the scientific experiment. Often, if it disagrees with what you're doing, then the data gets buried, and doctors continue doing whatever it was you were doing before.
Physicians will also develop practices without even doing one experiment, and follow them for a hundred years. Blood letting was a good example. It got used until the early 1900's to treat everything from cholera to (yes) blood loss. General Grant was said to have died from a blood letting treatment applied by a physician who was treating him.
It wouldn't have been hard to show that blood letting is useless. At any time, someone could have grabbed some farm animals, and showed that blood letting wasn't helping anything, and probably was making people sick.
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