ABSTRACT
Physicians customarily differentiate between therapeutic methods available for the treatment of a specific disorder as “standard” and “aggressive.” Sequentially, “standard” treatments are typically applied first; if the patient fails to respond or the disorder persists, more “aggressive” remedies are applied. It may happen that a method of treatment that initially emerged as an “aggressive” remedy demonstrates such clear superiority in the treatment of a particular disorder that it is widely adopted as “standard.” The focus in medicine is thus on the character of the disorder, and the aim of empirical medicine is to determine which treatments are likely to ameliorate what disorders-i.e., to identify therapeutic measures which are focused, disorderspecific, and disorder-effective and thus have been empirically validated as “treatments-of-choice” for specific medical disorders.
