Rethinking Medications

Suddenly, everything seems up for grabs about the medicines we take: Do they really work as advertised? Do some of them have dangerous, undisclosed side effects? Why are they so expensive, even unaffordable?

Jerry Avorn, MD, is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a senior internist in the Mass General Brigham health-care system. He built a leading research center at Harvard to study medication use, outcomes, costs, and policies and developed the educational outreach approach known as "academic detailing," providing evidence-based information about medications to prescribers. One of the nation's most highly cited researchers, Dr. Avorn is the author of Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs, and he has written or cowritten over six hundred papers in the medical literature as well as opinion pieces in The New York Times, The Washington Post, JAMA, and The New England Journal of Medicine.