WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW WHEN GETTING A PRESCRIPTION FOR A DRUG

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW WHEN GETTING A PRESCRIPTION FOR A DRUG: " Be a part of the decision-making process when your doctor offers a drug:

Get a thorough understanding of what he or she is prescribing and why.

Ask exactly what the drug is and why it has been chosen for your condition. How does it work?

Find out if it is new on the market. If so, why was it chosen over older drugs?

Find out if the drug is safe to take:

How will this drug interact with your other medications or over the counter drugs or
natural remedies you are taking?

What does your doctor personally know about the safety of the drug? How long was
it tested? How long were patients followed after taking it to determine if they developed bad effects? Has the FDA published any reports of adverse effects?"

RED FLAGS
These answers should give you strong reservations about taking the drug:

Your doctor is unclear about the mechanism of action of a drug (what it is doing inside the body). Either the mechanism is not known and only guessed at, or your doctor doesn’t understand it.

The drug was approved within the last two years. Thus it lacks an extensive safety record in the general population.

Your doctor doesn’t know of any adverse effects aside from what he reads along with you in the package insert. Since your doctor has not looked at the FDA website of adverse drug events he or she knows of no warnings to give you. This is something you will have to question carefully to see if your doctor is saying, “I know there are no special warnings to give you” or if your doctor is actually expressing, “I don’t know of any special precautions (because I haven’t bothered to look, all my data comes from the manufacturer’s glossy brochures).”

Your doctor is writing with a drug-maker emblazoned pen, jotting on a note pad sporting the logo of the drug manufacturer or carrying a coffee mug advertising the latest. These are indications of a heavily drug-salesman infiltrated office, and may well reflect an inordinate reliance on sales talk in the absence of careful review of the scientific pharmacologic information.

The drug is a look-alike or ‘me-too’ version of an older drug. This is offered to you at much greater expense without obvious medical advantage.