> To follow up on your cardiology example, I'd say that pills certainly helped, but the game changers really are the new toys of the interventional cardiologist

> To follow up on your cardiology example, I'd say that pills certainly helped, but the game changers really are the new toys of the interventional cardiologist. Balloon caths re-stenosed 30% of the time. Balloon caths with bare metal stents re-stenosed about 15% of the time. Balloon caths with stents and dual-platelet drugs re-stenose about 3% of the time. I think this is one of those "drugs help ... but less so" situations where drugs get less credit than they're worth, and the physician scientists that did the endless slogging to figure out how to optimize interventional cardio's toys deserve real credit. But, yes, I agree: most MD's aren't scientists. Quite a lot of MDs are only barely science-literate. They're engineers: they're taught a body of science and its application, with the expectation that they apply it usefully.