What is an empirical treatment?
In medicine, empirical treatment may refer to treatment presented before definitive diagnosis or provided based on observation and experience. The importance of the term may be obvious from the context. Both rely on practical medical experience that can detect the most effective way of treating diseases in some environments. Scientists who study empirical treatment in both senses of the word seek evidence to support therapeutic protocols and provide definitive documentation to justify its use in different medical environments. This may due to the concerns that the patient could develop complications while waiting for the test results or other assessments or concerns that the patient may not follow treatment if monitoring is required. For Example, if the patient arrives with what seems to be an infection of urinary tract, the doctor may prescribe antibiotics rather than to ask for a urine sample and test it to find out which organisms are present.
Based on experience, doctors can bring immediate empirical treatment in favor of the patient who needs care. If the patient does not match, further evaluation may provide information on why and can help the doctor decide how to proceed. In addition, empirical treatment can stabilize the patient long enough to find out what is happening so that the doctor can provide definitive care. For example, when someone stops breathing, the first goal is to secure the airways and get the patient to breathe again to keep the patient alive before continuing to test diagnostic testing to see why this happened.
observation and experience may inform empirical treatment rather than theory. This can be particularly common in psychology and psychiatry, where there are a number of theories that explain human behavior and how people respond to treatment. Individual mental health experts can make their own decisions on how to treat patients based on experience, surveys and interviews with otherspeople in the field. For example, cognitive behavioral therapy is a form of empirical treatment of several mental health disorders.
Experience can inform about the judgment of the GP, which is one of the reasons why patients tend to prefer healthcare providers with greater training and experience. In situations where several treatment procedures were to be considered, individual decisions may be made on the basis of observation of previous patients and similar events. Thus, two patients treated for the same condition can receive different and equally reasonable treatment, because their doctors have been working on practical experience in the past rather than the predominant medical theory.