Review of Physicians Desk Reference (PDR)
Indispensable but continues to be highly flawed, August 7, 2004
Reviewer: Mark Cannon "Mark Cannon" (Larchmont, NY)
The PDR is indispensable -- I'd be lost without it -- but it's highly flawed, and I can't believe that after all these years, they can't figure it out and do a better job. I don't think it would be that hard.
Some aspects of the format are problematic. It's hard to find certain things, and often you won't see what you're looking for even if you land on the right paragraph. Some examples:
(1) For some reason, side effects are divided between two or more different sections of each article. I'm sure there's some logic to this, but it certainly isn't evident, and it makes it much harder to find out what we want to know.
(2) Some important sections -- for example, "Drug Interactions" -- are hard to find, no matter how experienced you are with the PDR. One solution would be to have boldface headings for such sections.
(3) How often have you wanted to find "half-lives" of a medication and perhaps its metabolites, and how often have you actually found them? They are there, but they're buried. Something as important as this should certainly be highlighted, perhaps in tabular form.
The sad fact is that unless you're quite persistent, you often won't find a lot of what you're looking for when you open the PDR, even though it's there.
Some other flaws are probably unavoidable. For example, despite the fact that seemingly anything and everything is mentioned as a possible side effect for every medication, common side effects sometimes are not mentioned at all. Also, oftentimes some of the major uses for a given medication are not mentioned. These problems aren't the fault of the publisher. The first reflects failures of the medical literature in general -- if a side effect isn't mentioned prominently in the literature, it might not find its way into the PDR. The second reflects the fact that many correct usages of medications are not officially approved.
Some caveats for consumers: The listed dosage ranges for any given medication are sometimes too limited. Lower or higher dosages may be right for some people. And also, do beware of those endless lists of possible side effects. Remember that these aren't necessarily things that will happen; they only MIGHT happen. (Many of them rarely if ever happen, at least in terms of their being caused by the medications.) And sometimes the lists fail to include things that DO happen! If you are convinced that a medication has done something to you and it's not mentioned in the PDR, you still could very well be right. But, don't assume that something IS happening just because it IS mentioned on that endless list!
It's hard to express a simple overall assessment of the PDR. The book is an important reference, but it's hard to understand that the publisher hasn't figured out how to do a better job. Maybe they'll read this page and finally do it.
Content Courtesy : www.amazon.com