Helping MDs prescribe the best drugs

After an unfortunate encounter with a jellyfish (and the first aid team that tried to help him), Jerry Avorn, a professor at Harvard Medical School, examines how doctor's choices for prescription drugs are often un-uniform and out of date. Avorn notes that there are two major problems when it comes to a physician's understanding of prescription drug. First, there's no system in place that tests similar treatments in head-to-head trials. Experimental drugs are tested against placebos, but that doesn't tell doctors which treatment is best if there's a choice of, say, five. Also, even if this information were available, there is no set way to communicate the most up-to-date findings to doctors, which means that docs often rely on drug reps to learn about new treatments [1]. "All of us need access to current, noncommercial medical information. Besides helping to contain our runaway medication expenditures, programs of this kind could prevent a lot of needless suffering--by patients and doctors alike," notes Avorn in a New York Times Op-Ed.

To read more
- check out his Op-Ed [2] at the New York Times