Just Say No to Off-Label Rx

It's a common trend among physicians - prescribing medication for something other than what it's approved for (example, the plethora of irrelevant Rx's for Neurontin that led to massive class action suits - or Seroquil, more recently). Be particularly reluctant to agree to alternate uses of anti-depressants and anti-psychotics (one would hope you would be anyway) don't take the brown pills

"The FDA requires drug companies to test their drugs only against conditions for which they're seeking approval. "Clearly, for many of these off-label uses, the manufacturers are benefiting enormously, and in some cases I think one could argue that off-label use has allowed them to circumvent the regulatory process," Stafford says. Although the regulatory process is not infallible, he says, "it does provide a level of scrutiny" beyond what the off-label uses have received...

"...according to a paper posted last month by the online journal PLoS Medicine, industry-paid "nationally known, influential academic physicians" help create "buzz" about off-label uses by writing about them for publication or presentation at scientific meetings. The article was written by physician Adriane Fugh-Berman of Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and Douglas Melnick, a preventive medicine doctor in North Hollywood, Calif.

Earlier this month in PLoS Medicine, medical school professor Michael Wilkes and law professor Margaret Johns, both of the University of California, Davis, called for doctors always to inform patients that they want to use a drug off-label, giving them the chance to decide whether they want to take it."