Drugs over-used, says doctor

Press, 26 February 1983, Page 17

Drugs over-used, says doctor

PA Auckland mPatient deaths from adverse reactions to drugs regularly go undiscovered and are attributed to other causes, says a visiting clinical pharmacologist, Dr Craig Brater. Dr Brater is associate professor of pharmacology and internal medicine at the University of Texas health science Centre in Dallas. “Physicians in general are not very skilled at using drugs. If they are confronted with a patient (who is suffering symptons of an adverse reaction) their first impluse is to think there is some other disease process going on. The last thing they think of is the medication." he said. “If you are a physician charged with taking care of people it is psychologically uncomfortable to find out you have done someone harm — or worse, contributed to their demise." He said that this may be part of the reason that deaths caused by drugs often go undiscovered.

Dr Brater said that his job was to improve drug use. including teaching doctors how to modify doses in patients whose condition was complicated by other factors. He believes that drugs, in general, are over-used. “Historically, medicine was a science-art of diagnosis, and we did not really have a lot of treatments to offer patients, and it was largely an intellectual exercise. The main thing we could offer was to tell the patient what he had and his prognosis.” But, the explosion of drugs available over the last 20 to 25 years has left doctor education lagging behind. Doctors seldom see their own prescribing mistakes, but when their charts are handed to other physicians the errors are obvious. “I don't think drastic measures are necessary, but it is an area in which we could do better, and if nothing is done, it will get worse.” Apart from a lag in educa-

tion. another problem was how doctors could make the best use of the huge amount of available information about new drugs. Dr Brater said that his centre was working on creating computer systems which could be handled on very small office terminals so that doctors could have access to drug information.