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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11595

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Shankar PR, Mishra P, Subish P, Upadhyay DK.
Can drug utilization help in promoting the more rational use of medicine? Experiences from Western Nepal
Pak J Pharm Sci. 2007 July; 20:(3):243-48
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=17545111


Abstract:

Drug utilization research describes the extent, nature and determinants of drug use in populations and aims to facilitate the more rational use of medicines. The departments of Pharmacology and Clinical Pharmacy at the Manipal College of Medical Sciences, Pokhara, Nepal are committed to promoting the more rational use of medicines. The departments run a Drug Information Center and a Pharmacovigilance Center in the teaching hospital. Over the last eight years, the departments have conducted drug utilization studies in the teaching hospital and the community. A few of these were of the intervention type and drug use was studied before and after the intervention. Members of the departments are on the hospital Drug and Therapeutics Committee. Educational initiatives to improve prescribing have been carried out in a few instances. Restricting the number of brands in the hospital pharmacy and creation of a hospital drug list has been carried out. The impact of these initiatives has been studied only in a few cases. Generic prescribing was found to be low. The educational initiatives to improve prescribing had only limited success. The hospital is in the process of framing antimicrobial use guidelines for various departments. A hospital formulary is under preparation. The influence of drug utilization studies on the prescribing patterns has been low to moderate. The department of Clinical Pharmacy runs a Medication Counseling Center in the hospital and teaches appropriate use of medicines to patients. The studies and initiatives to promote the more rational use of medicines should be continued and strengthened.

Keywords:
MeSH Terms: Drug Information Services Drug Utilization Review* Drugs, Generic/therapeutic use Formularies, Hospital Hospitals, Teaching Humans Nepal Patient Education Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee/organization & administration Physician's Practice Patterns* Self Medication Substances: Drugs, Generic

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909