Editor's choice

What makes doctors change?

Why do doctors change their practice? What makes a doctor change from prescribing one drug to another for a particular condition? These are simple questions of great importance, not least to pharmaceutical companies. Yet - as with so many other simple questions in medicine - we cannot answer the questions with any confidence. We all have opinions and can speculate, but we have few data.

Now we have some from David Armstrong and others (p 949). They asked 19 general practitioners to think of specific changes …