Paradigms Lost: Perceptions and Practice in Clinical Medicine

The propensity for medical errors has received much attention in recent years, but there is another shortcoming in clinical practice that is much larger in scope and circumstance, i.e., resistance to change. Clinical medicine is littered with traditional practices that retain their popularity despite evidence that they are either ineffective, harmful, or inferior to newer alternative practices. This unjustified allegiance to tradition is found in all scientific disciplines. Each scientific discipline operates with a collection of conceptual schemes called paradigms that are widely accepted by the scientists in that discipline.