Off Label Prescribing

Jeremy Thurman

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Now this has to scare you a little. "Approximately one out of every five medications prescribed by US physicians are for conditions that the drugs have not been approved for by the FDA, new study results suggest. Moreover, three quarters of these off-label uses are not backed by strong scientific evidence for safety and efficacy, the authors report."

Dr. Randall S. Stafford, at the Stanford Prevention Research Center in California, and his associates used data from the 2001 National Disease and Therapeutic Index (NDTI), in which randomly selected office-based physicians were asked to report patient encounters for 2 days, including all diagnoses and drug therapies.

Now the question I have to ask is whether the drug companies are promoting this off label use like they did with a famed diet drug or are the doctors simply think they are more knowledgable than the FDA. This has to worrisome as a patient of these physicians who are willing to treat someone w/ untested medication.