The Essential Guide to Prescription Drugs started in 1977 as a one‐off monograph, became an irregular series, and for the past three years has come out annually. It has, therefore, had 20 years to become established as a standard American source for members of the public to use in order to find information about drugs that have been prescribed for them. The bulk of the book consists of detailed reviews of just over 300 drugs regularly prescribed for outpatient use for the treatment of prevalent, relatively serious or significant diseases or disorders, published in a straight alphabetic order, from Acarbose to Zolpidem. Most of the reviews take two to three pages, and give brand names and classes, a boxed list of benefits versus risks, and details of uses, dosage, usual duration of treatment, conditions under which it should not be taken or conditions which the physician should be told about, side effects, adverse effects, and other precautionary advice. Useful colour photographs of most of the pills, in their prescribed American form, are included. No references are given to further reading under individual drugs. Other features include general guidelines for safe drug use, notes on some current developments in pharmacology, tables of drug information and a glossary.
Leaving aside the non‐quantifiable human problems, Johnson and Bootman (1995) have estimated that the cost to the American economy of the ill effects of medicines is in the region of $136 billion p.a. There is, therefore, a strong economic as well as human case for patients knowing as much as possible about what medicines they are taking.
This book can be criticised for what seem to us to be occasional errors of judgment: it quotes Risperidone as being of possible benefit in the treatment of refractory schizophrenia, which we would not recommend, for example. In the interests of giving readers access to the maximum of information we would have liked to see references to further reading under particular drugs (Martindale’s Extra Pharmacopoeia (1996) is very useful in this respect.) For quite a number of drugs there are now discussion groups on the Internet. Addresses of some of these would have been a useful asset. We would also criticise the terminology used, which is sometimes excessively alarmist ‐ the authors tend to use terms like “toxic” where we would use “deleterious” or “harmful.” On the whole, however, this book can be recommended to American and Canadian libraries as a good source of public reference information. It cannot really be recommended to public libraries in other countries where drug names, prescribing practices etc are very different. Major English public reference libraries should try to stock a copy of Martindale. The best equivalent to this book for general public use in the UK is the BMA’s consumer guide (1998).
