Study: Doctors Slow to Make Changes in Medicine
A recent study found that many doctors are reluctant to embrace cutting edge medicine unless they receive a little peer pressure from their colleagues.
The study looked at 19 maternity hospitals in Argentina and Uruguay to determine the best way to encourage doctors to embrace change that suggests the old ways may not be the best.
Found in the New England Journal of History, the study looked at the time it took obstetricians to discontinue their use of episiotomies to widen the vaginal opening for birth and embrace the preventive use of oxytocin-like drugs to help with contractions, both of which, they said, reduce the risk of complications.
Oxytocins are mammalian hormones that act as neurotransmitters in the brain. It is also sold as medication under names Pitocin and Syntocinon.
Researchers, led by Fernando Althabe of the Institute of Clinical Effectiveness and Health Policy in Buenos Aires, studied the practices of health care workers in nine hospitals that received seminars calling for the use of oxytocins.
After the first year of the study, the rate of episiotomy use among health care workers was remained at 44 percent and the rate of giving prophylactic oxytocin rose from 2.6 percent at the start of the study to 12.3 percent.
However, in 10 other hospitals that used trained opinion leaders, such as doctors and midwives, the rate of oxytocin use changed from 2.1 percent to 83.6 percent at the end of the study.
The episiotomy rates in the second hospital decreased from 41.1 percent to 29.9 percent.
"This randomized trial, conducted in Latin America, showed that a behavioral intervention can change health care practice," researchers said.
For every 1,000 vaginal deliveries, the active interventions prevented an estimated 13 severe hemorrhages, 100 mild hemorrhages and 109 unnecessary episiotomies.
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