The Undereducated Physician's Therapeutic Decisions

In this issue of the Journal Avorn and Soumerai claim that highly motivated and highly trained doctors of pharmacy can enhance the quality of therapeutic decisions by practicing physicians.1 The authors develop several premises. One is that generally available information that would lead physicians to better prescribing behavior is often not used in making therapeutic decisions. Unquestionably, at least one of the drugs whose use they studied illustrates their point. Propoxyphene is a drug with limited analgesic efficacy and a much higher incidence of toxicity than is associated with commonly used, quite efficacious, and much cheaper agents. On the other . . .