Over at DB’s Medical Rants Robert has responded  to my gentle chiding and has written a nice piece regarding what’s wrong (in his view) with Wampum’s piece on malpractice.  (Note that he got up at 4 am to write it too! Who’d be an intensive internist?)

He’s also alerted me (and you) to a very interesting report about how doctors changed their behavior after the results of the two big trials on HRT and Alpha Blockers in the last couple of years. (Reuters release here but both full articles are unusually available for free from JAMA via my earlier links). The findings suggest that doctors do indeed respond in their prescribing habits to the latest evidence, particularly if the results of the trial are blared all over the press. This just makes the whole conversation over evidence based medicine more and more confusing.  How come doctors change practice on a dime over the HRT study but take years and years to apply some of the best practices elsewhere . . . . . I think Robert’s deliberately trying to make my future article about this harder to write!