Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs
Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks, and Expenditure of Prescription Drugs Books
Product Description
If you judge that the latest blockbuster tablets is worth a premium price over your generic brand, or that doctors have access to all the in rank 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 tablets as compared to another. In Powerful Medicines, he reminds us that every pill we take represents a delicate negotiate 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, troublesome side effects, and troubling expenditure 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 shape up; 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 expenditure that places vital drugs beyond the reach of many Americans.
In this engagingly written book, Dr. Avorn questions 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 near 20 percent per year? How can physicians and patients pick the best tablets in its class? How do doctors really make their prescribing decisions, and why do those decisions sometimes go incorrect? Why do so many Americans suffer preventable illnesses and deaths that proper drug use may possibly have averted? How can the nation gain control over its getting larger 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 matter-of-fact advice on how the nation can improve its drug-approval administer, 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.Amazon.com Review
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 make a risk/benefit balance for prescription drugs. His premise: “Every drug is a triangle with three faces–representing the healing it can result in, the hazards it can inflict and the economic impact of each.” Avorn’s gifts as a novelist 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 nearly the globe. The final chapters make an insightful template for emerging broadcast policy. Throughout, Avorn pulls at common threads: the line between private and broadcast 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
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The author describes a wide variability in medicinal effectiveness.
He is critical of the FDA because the agency analyzes submitted data instead of initiating its own tests. The flaws of classic
studies are exposed i.e. HERS. The use of estrogen may lead to
the incidence of greater heart attacks in the first year. The author describes a classic marking chasm which makes medicinal
comparability hard to measure/quantify. The concept of tiers of
acceptability is discussed in contrast to the FDA current approval administer which emphasizes the safety and efficacy of a drug.
The Avorn MD work is valuable because the author clarifies “small known” measurement problems in establishing a baseline for drug comparability and valuation. This book would make a excellent project for any science/medical student.
Rating: 5 / 5
Dr. Avorn has done a magnificant job of explaining the extremely complex world of drugs and drug development. His nuanced approach illustrates that there are no simple solutions. Each chapter is truly a masterpiece of analysis.
I have read several books on drug development and the FDA and this is undoubtedly the best.
Rating: 3 / 5
One of those rare productions that provides insight into the discipline even as holding the interest of the reader. A must read for anyone caught up in the health care industry.
Rating: 5 / 5
I’m very satisfied with my buy. The product was, as described, groundbreaking new. It arrived relatively promptly and in the above-described shape up.
Rating: 5 / 5
It is a excellent consequence of freedom of the press that such books as this are able to be printed. The content of this book is well worth reading.
Rating: 5 / 5