The Physician's Responsibility in the Age of Therapeutic Plenty

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Abstract
The response of the medical profession to the problems and opportunities created by the plethora of potent new pharmacological agents is deficient in certain respects. New remedies are adopted rapidly, and apparently widely, at times in the face of poor or inadequate evidence. Many of these remedies, helpful or not, are not innocuous but produce unpleasant side effects, toxicity and sometimes even death. The responsibility of the physician for the provision of rational and beneficial treatment would be discharged more adequately if: (1) increased attention were given to the principles of clinical pharmacology in medical education; (2) individual physicians refused to prescribe a preparation before they were convinced, by a critical examination of published evidence, that this product is the best available therapy for the patient; (3) medical journals adopted more critical standards for the publication of clinical papers; (4) medical journals required that advertisements for Pharmaceuticals cite references to published papers which support their claims, and (5) organized medicine adopted and enforced minimum standards to be met for the clinical trial of drugs generally and of nonapproved drugs particularly.