should patients read package inserts pdr in article mar news wesleyan edu rginzberg eagle wesleyan edu ruth ginzberg writes hmmmm here s one place where i really think the patient ought to take more responsibility for him or herself there is absolutely no reason why you can t ask the pharmacist filling the prescription for the physicians package insert for the medication when you pick it up at the pharmacy make sure to tell the pharmacist that you want the physicians package insert not the if people are going to do this i really wish they would tell me first i d be happy to go over the insert in the pdr with them and explain everything all too many patients read the insert and panic and then on the next visit sheepishly admit they were afraid to take the drug and we are starting over again at square one some of them probably didn t even come back for followup because they didn t want to admit they wouldn t take the drug or thought i was trying to kill them or something what people don t understand about the inserts is that they report every adverse side effect ever reported without substantiating that the drug was responsible the insert is a legal document to slough liability from the manufacturer to the physician if something was to happen if patients want to have the most useful and reliable information on a drug they would be so much better off getting hold of one of the ama drug evaluation books or something similar that is much more scientific there are very few drugs that someone hasn t reported a death from taking patients don t realize that and don t usually appreciate the risks to themselves properly i m sure herman is going to go ballistic but so be it another problem is that probably most drugs have been reported to cause impotence half the males who read that will falsely assume it could permanently cause them to lose sexual function and so will refuse to take any drug like that this can be a real problem for pdr readers there needs to be some way of providing patients with tools geared to them that allow them to get the information they need i am involved in a research project to do that with migraine as the domain it involves a computer system that will provide answers to questions about migraine as well as the therapy prescribed for the patient for common illnesses such as migraine and hypertension this may help quite a bit the patient could spend as much time as needed with the computer and this would then not burden the physician clearly physicians in large part fail to answer all the questions patients have as is demonstrated over and over here on the net where we get asked things that the patients should have found out from their physician but didn t why they didn t isn t always the physician s fault either sometimes the patients are afraid to ask they won t be as afraid to ask the system we hope gordon banks n jxp skepticism is the chastity of the intellect and geb cadre dsl pitt edu it is shameful to surrender it too soon
