An article published in the April issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine documented that drug reps fail to inform MDs about dangerous side effects in 59% of cases. Yet these MDs still reported that they we still likely to prescribe these drugs. This is against the law as well as immoral, but there is no resource to monitor what happens in the doctor's office.
Who is teaching MDs about new drugs? Why don't MDs do their own research? Where can they obtain literature that they can trust? These problems explain why MDs know much more about the benefits of drugs than they do about their dangerous side effects. They also explain part of why there are 400,000 deaths from medications every year and millions of hospitalizations.
