Clinical Trials and Meta-Analysis

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Abstract
The factors that influence doctors' decisions to embrace a new treatment are incompletely understood. Choices are influenced by advertising, medical opinion leaders, peers, and patients, but of all the sources, the most objective are randomized clinical trials. In this issue of the Journal, Lamas and colleagues show that the publication of clinical trials can have a prompt and direct effect on physicians' prescribing practices.1 The select group of physicians whose patients were enrolled in the Survival and Ventricular Enlargement trial of angiotensin-converting—enzyme inhibitors in patients who recovered from a myocardial infarction responded fairly rapidly to the published results of other . . .