The effective treatment of many mental health conditions necessitates that clinicians prescribe medications. Considerations for ethical treatment, however, demand that clinicians be wary of advertising hype, aggressive sales pitches, and confusing statistical methods. Psychotropic Drug Prescriber's Survival Guide is a long-awaited primer on the basic principles of pharmaceutical research, statistical methods, and health care ethics. The common sense approach of the authors enables practitioners to use information about psychiatric medications intelligently and to develop responsible prescribing practices. This book appears at a time when new guidelines are emerging every day in response to growing public concern about industry marketing. The authors write within the context of this changing policy environment and apprise readers of what is developing in terms of regulations and what impact those regulations will have on their practice. However, sensible prescribers recognize that responsible treatment still cannot depend on external controls. Psychotropic Drug Prescriber's Survival Guide helps clinicians negotiate this complex situation and arms them with strategies for getting to the facts in an era in which solid science competes with marketing fictions.

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This hard-hitting expose does for prescription drugs what "Silent Spring" did for pesticides, revealing the hidden dangers of the most commonly prescribed medications--and what the consumer can do to minimize the risks of serious side effects.

Drug overdose, driven largely by overdose related to the use of opioids, is now the leading cause of unintentional injury death in the United States. The ongoing opioid crisis lies at the intersection of two public health challenges: reducing the burden of suffering from pain and containing the rising toll of the harms that can arise from the use of opioid medications. Chronic pain and opioid use disorder both represent complex human conditions affecting millions of Americans and causing untold disability and loss of function. In the context of the growing opioid problem, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched an Opioids Action Plan in early 2016. As part of this plan, the FDA asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to convene a committee to update the state of the science on pain research, care, and education and to identify actions the FDA and others can take to respond to the opioid epidemic, with a particular focus on informing FDA's development of a formal method for incorporating individual and societal considerations into its risk-benefit framework for opioid approval and monitoring.

Thanks to remarkable advances in modern health care attributable to science, engineering, and medicine, it is now possible to cure or manage illnesses that were long deemed untreatable. At the same time, however, the United States is facing the vexing challenge of a seemingly uncontrolled rise in the cost of health care. Total medical expenditures are rapidly approaching 20 percent of the gross domestic product and are crowding out other priorities of national importance. The use of increasingly expensive prescription drugs is a significant part of this problem, making the cost of biopharmaceuticals a serious national concern with broad political implications. Especially with the highly visible and very large price increases for prescription drugs that have occurred in recent years, finding a way to make prescription medicinesâ€"and health care at largeâ€"more affordable for everyone has become a socioeconomic imperative. Affordability is a complex function of factors, including not just the prices of the drugs themselves, but also the details of an individual's insurance coverage and the number of medical conditions that an individual or family confronts. Therefore, any solution to the affordability issue will require considering all of these factors together. The current high and increasing costs of prescription drugsâ€"coupled with the broader trends in overall health care costsâ€"is unsustainable to society as a whole. Making Medicines Affordable examines patient access to affordable and effective therapies, with emphasis on drug pricing, inflation in the cost of drugs, and insurance design. This report explores structural and policy factors influencing drug pricing, drug access programs, the emerging role of comparative effectiveness assessments in payment policies, changing finances of medical practice with regard to drug costs and reimbursement, and measures to prevent drug shortages and foster continued innovation in drug development. It makes recommendations for policy actions that could address drug price trends, improve patient access to affordable and effective treatments, and encourage innovations that address significant needs in health care.

Following the success of the previous edition, A Nurse's Survival Guide to Drugs in Practice has been completely updated with revised content written by expert practitioners and educators in the field of drug administration and pharmacology. It continues to follow the popular systems approach and is now revised with new sections on the immune system added. - The book provides the underpinning current knowledge required for professional judgement and safer medication management. - This will be an invaluable resource for those studying prescribing courses as well as being useful for paramedics, student nurses and all qualified staff. - A more detailed account of medication management, including drug errors and strategies to mitigate against them occurring, is included. - The multidisciplinary nature of drug administration from the naming of drugs, through drug preparation, administration and outcome are taken into account.

Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) are increasingly encountered in resource-limited settings. In the context of a national response to MDR- and XDR-TB, health workers in TB clinics (in district hospitals and some accredited health centers) will need to diagnose MDR-TB, initiate second-line anti-TB drugs, and monitor MDR-TB treatment. This Field Guide was created to help health workers carry out these tasks. It is a job aid that medical officers and TB nurses are meant to use frequently during the day for quick reference. It is based on the Emergency Update 2008 of Guidelines for Programmatic Management of Drug-resistant Tuberculosis, and may be considered a companion document to these guidelines. It also draws on the experience of the international health NGO Partners In Health (PIH) in many countries. This module should be introduced to health workers in the context of a training course with a strong emphasis on TB-HIV co-management.