Practicing With Intent: How to Teach an Old Dogma New Tricks

Abstract

Clinicians are constantly bombarded with an onslaught of newly published data, yet they must make clinical decisions despite a dearth of clinical data. Sometimes, they may fall back on clinical practices entrenched by experience, unaware that they are upheld by dogmatic tradition rather than robust evidence. Ideally, the totality of evidence must be assessed and utilized for clinical decision-making, irrespective of entrenched orthodoxy. Here, we explore the questions, how much evidence is needed to revise established clinical practices? and, more fundamentally, can data alone truly catalyze such shifts?

Keywords: dogma; ethics; evidence; evidence-based medicine; medical education.