title: Enigmatic, but understandable: empiric therapy.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  We've identified a few bad outcomes after drugs were prescribed empirically for residents at our facility. At a recent interdisciplinary meeting, a clinician from another department said, "I don't really know what 'empiric therapy' is. Maybe we need a definition and some guidelines about when it is appropriate and when it isn't." Can you help?
  
  
  METHODS
  Empiric therapy has several definitions, depending upon the source. It ranges from "derived from experiment and observation rather than theory" at one extreme, to "relying on medical quackery or uninfluenced by pathology or clinical tools" at the other.
authors.affiliation: National Cancer Institute, NIH, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
authors.forename: Jeannette Y
authors.initials: JY
authors.lastname: Wick
mesh_terms: D000900:Anti-Bacterial Agents / Q000627:therapeutic use; D001424:Bacterial Infections / Q000188:drug therapy; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000628:therapy; D019348:Empiricism / Q000266:history; D019317:Evidence-Based Medicine; D049690:History, Ancient; D006801:Humans; D008134:Long-Term Care; D017410:Practice Guidelines as Topic; D010818:Practice Patterns, Physicians'
chemical_list: D000900:Anti-Bacterial Agents