Epidemiological Consideration of Adverse Reactions to Drugs

Abstract

There must be few doctors or informed members of the public who remain unaware of the worldwide rising tide of drug consumption. More and more drugs are being produced and promoted for a widening range of disease conditions but a rather more disturbing phenomenon is that the man in the, street (and to an even greater extent the woman in the street) increasingly seems to expect his doctor to provide medication which will have the effect of making life’s problems go away. Trethowan (1975)¹ in a thoughtful article pointed out that drugs are now being demanded for “those who dislike their jobs, fear redundancy, cannot get along with their wives” etc. Nor is it fair for doctors to blame the public and patients for this phenomenon since it has been the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry which have created these expectations. Not only is irrational prescribing of this sort medically wrong and wasteful but since it distracts attention from the underlying stresses and causative factors it militates against effective relief by merely patching over the cracks in the patient’s life.