Empirical treatment is a medical treatment not derived from the scientific method, but derived from observation, survey or common use.
In the medical profession, the term is also used when treatment is started before a diagnosis is confirmed (example: antibiotics). The most common reason is that investigations are sometimes needed in order to confirm a diagnosis, which take time, and a delay in treatment can harm the patient.
Famous quotes containing the words empirical and/or treatment:
“To develop an empiricist account of science is to depict it as involving a search for truth only about the empirical world, about what is actual and observable.... It must involve throughout a resolute rejection of the demand for an explanation of the regularities in the observable course of nature, by means of truths concerning a reality beyond what is actual and observable, as a demand which plays no role in the scientific enterprise.”
—Bas Van Fraassen (b. 1941)
“Ambivalence reaches the level of schizophrenia in our treatment of violence among the young. Parents do not encourage violence, but neither do they take up arms against the industries which encourage it. Parents hide their eyes from the books and comics, slasher films, videos and lyrics which form the texture of an adolescent culture. While all successful societies have inhibited instinct, ours encourages it. Or at least we profess ourselves powerless to interfere with it.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)