Making Drug Therapy Safer and More Effective Is a Primary Concern for Pharmacists Everywhere

Evidence is a critical consideration in any clinical process, where there is usually potential for interventions to cause harm or to have unintended consequences arising from a change to the course of patient management. Pharmacists working in the care of older people are well-versed in this concept, given that medication use can create clinical benefit and drug-related harm through mechanisms such as toxicities and drug interactions. Published in this edition of the journal, there is discussion of the utility of pharmacogenomics to guide drug therapy. This is meritorious science, but if everyone is honest, it is hardly something new, or for that matter, widely used. But what underlies the imperative to continue to disseminate this information in a peer-reviewed, indexed journal? The answer lies not so much in validating the science but in promoting the approach.