Powerful Medicines : The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs

NOTE: If this is your first time here, please start at the homepage. You can also browse other books to find more information.

Powerful Medicines : The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs

Amazon.com
Profiteeering pharmaceutical companies and the FDA have met their match in Dr. Jerry Avorn, a Harvard Medical school researcher and clinician. In Powerful Medicines, he brilliantly combines patient vignettes, scientific critique, and statistics to create a risk/benefit balance for prescription drugs. His premise: "Every drug is a triangle with three faces--representing the healing it can bring, the hazards it can inflict and the economic impact of each." Avorn's gifts as a writer are apparent in the prologue, an edgy account of the mismanaged medications of several stroke patients. He then details the intellectual history of drug assessment and benefits, including the biblical food police in the Book of Daniel, the deer in the headlights Estrogen debacle and the current infatuation with Ginseng and other alternative medicines. Turning from benefits to risks, Avorn examines diet pills, Viagra, cold medicines and diabetes drugs with comparisons the decisions of Dr. Fautus--who makes life-changing bargains between safety and effectiveness. Other insightful chapters offer views of prescription drug economies, and comparative healthcare around the globe. The final chapters create an insightful template for emerging public policy. Throughout, Avorn pulls at common threads: the line between personal and public responsibility, the perils of drug promotion, and the marketplace that usurps the role of scientific evidence in selecting treatments. Anyone looking for a quick muckraking read will be disappointed. But Avorn's views, literate and complex, will frame the debate on prescription drugs for years to come. --Barbara Mackoff

From Publishers Weekly
In this pragmatic volume, Avorn sets out an impressive plan for the American health care system to get helpful drugs to those who need them, protect patients from dangerous side effects and keep costs within reasonable limits. Avorn, chief of the division of pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, argues, "[F]or a sum no greater than our current drug budget, medications could provide all Americans with the most productive and cost-effective interventions in all of health care." Avorn claims, "[W]e waste billions of dollars a year on prescription drugs that are excessively priced, poorly prescribed, or improperly taken." To remedy this situation, reform is needed in how new drugs are approved and marketed. In addition, practicing physicians need access to state-of-the-art information about new medications, including how well they compare to established (and often cheaper) products. Computer technology, Avorn shows, can bring together the latest information on treatment options and drug contraindications. But changes in the pharmaceutical industry itself?of which Avorn does not hold a flattering view?may be necessary to eliminate pressure to prescribe the most heavily advertised and costly new product when old standbys are equally effective. Though this informative and witty book is overly long, it makes a compelling case for prescription sanity and shows how constructive change can realistically be achieved.
Copyright ? Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.