Doctors have long resisted having science guide their practice

Why Doctors Hate Science | Sharon Begley | Newsweek.com:

"Doctors have long resisted having science guide their practice. That's obvious from the disparity in clinical practices from one region of the U.S. to another, as The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care has been finding since the early 1990s. Rates of coronary-bypass surgery among Medicare patients in McAllen, Texas, are five times those in Pueblo, Colo. Rates of back surgery in Casper, Wyo., are six times those in Honolulu and the Bronx. From one city to another, the frequency of visits to specialists varies more than fivefold. Yet elderly people in Casper don't have worse back pain than those in the Bronx, and those in Texas aren't suffering occluded arteries at higher rates than those in Colorado. Instead, the enormous disparity in how doctors in different regions treat the same condition reflects medical culture, not medical science."