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The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs
Vintage
August 2005
On Sale: August 9, 2005
480 pages
ISBN: 1400030781
EAN: 9781400030781
Trade Size (reprint)
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Non-Fiction | Self-Help Health
If you believe that the latest blockbuster medication is
worth a premium price over your generic brand, or that
doctors have access to all the information they need about a
drug’s safety and effectiveness each time they write a
prescription, Dr. Jerry Avorn has some sobering news.
Drawing on more than twenty-five years of patient care,
teaching, and research at Harvard Medical School, he shares
his firsthand experience of the wide gap in our knowledge of
the effectiveness of one medication as compared to another.
In Powerful Medicines, he reminds us that every pill we take
represents a delicate compromise between the promise of
healing, the risk of side effects, and an increasingly
daunting price. The stakes on each front grow higher every
year as new drugs with impressive power, worrisome side
effects, and troubling costs are introduced. This is a comprehensive behind-the-scenes look at issues
that affect everyone: our shortage of data comparing the
worth of similar drugs for the same condition; alarming
lapses in the detection of lethal side effects; the underuse
of life-saving medications; lavish marketing campaigns that
influence what doctors prescribe; and the resulting upward
spiral of costs that places vital drugs beyond the reach of
many Americans. In this engagingly written book, Dr. Avorn asks questions
that will interest every consumer: How can a product judged
safe by the Food and Drug Administration turn out to have
unexpectedly lethal side effects? Why has the nation’s drug
bill been growing at nearly 20 percent per year? How can
physicians and patients pick the best medication in its
class? How do doctors actually make their prescribing
decisions, and why do those decisions sometimes go wrong?
Why do so many Americans suffer preventable illnesses and
deaths that proper drug use could have averted? How can the
nation gain control over its escalating drug budget without
resorting to rationing or draconian governmental controls?
Using clinical case histories taken from his own work as a
practitioner, researcher, and advocate, Dr. Avorn
demonstrates the impressive power of the well-conceived
prescription as well as the debacles that can result when
medications are misused. He describes an innovative program
that employs the pharmaceutical industry’s own marketing
techniques to reduce use of some of the most overprescribed
and overpriced products. Powerful Medicines offers timely
and practical advice on how the nation can improve its
drug-approval process, and how patients can work with
doctors to make sure their prescriptions are safe,
effective, and as affordable as possible. This is a passionate and provocative call for action as well
as a compelling work of clear-headed science.
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