Enigmatic, but understandable: empiric therapy.

PROBLEM: 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?

SOLUTION: 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.