>because doctors have to do that sort of thing (eg. GSK releases lamotrigine, do you give it to your patients?). Ideally, that's how it would work. In practice

>because doctors have to do that sort of thing (eg. GSK releases lamotrigine, do you give it to your patients?). Ideally, that's how it would work. In practice, it appears that in many cases, doctors do little research beyond what pharmaceutical reps tell them[1]. This seems to have a lot to do with time constraints. Doctors report spending an average of 4.4 hours per week reading medical journals, and they only read the full text of about a third of the articles they read[2]. On average, the FDA approves about three new drugs each month. If new drugs were all a doctor needed to read about, 6 hours for each one might be enough to get a decent idea of safety and efficacy. But of course, that's not all a doctor needs to read up on. But of course that has no bearing on whether doctors know how to read scientific papers. [1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-013-2411-7 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-013-2411-7 [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1495716/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1495716/