Patients and other influences

Patients' voices reverberate through this week's BMJ—together with doctors' ambivalence about how much to listen to them.

Alistair Howitt and David Armstrong, for example, explore what happens when evidence based medicine comes up against patient preferences (p 1324). They studied the extent to which implementation of an evidence based treatment, antithrombotic treatment in atrial fibrillation, was possible by identifying 132 patients in one general practice with a history of atrial fibrillation. One hundred were eligible for warfarin, but by the end of the …