If you think we've got problems here in the U.S. developing evidence-based medicine, just think about the challenge in a place like Russia. Health writer and blogger Merrill Goozner just spent two weeks reporting in Russia, and we were fascinated by his piece on the Scientific American website.The problem, he writes, begins in the medical schools, where "young doctors receive almost no instruction on biostatistics, epidemiology and methods of decoding the evidence generated by clinical trials." Russian doctors make about $800 a month, meaning getting access to western medical literature is often out of reach (besides, it's in English). So while neither our health system nor our lawmakers have yet figured out how to stimulate more comparative effectiveness research (and how to get the research acted on), at least we aren't treating pulmonary patients with aerosolized salt dust in "cave-like rooms"—a practice that's been common in Eastern Europe for two centuries, but according to Goozner, never systematically studied.