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.

A pocket-sized revision and reference guide offering practical, real-world advice for new prescribers from all professional backgrounds.

Print+CourseSmart

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.

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.