The prescription of medications for diagnoses, to age groups, or in doses other than the FDA-approved ones, is a common, legal, and necessary practice in medicine today. This practice is known as off-label use or off-label prescribing. Those new to this issue may wonder why physicians and other prescribers would ever deviate from prescribing in territory where the FDA has not given their stamp of approval.
In the ideal world, clinical trials would be conducted for all patient populations and diagnoses for which various medications might be useful. In reality, though, this is neither practical nor possible. Consequently, many patient populations and many patients with particular diagnoses would have few treatment options available if the medical establishment avoided off-label prescribing.
For example, child psychiatry is a huge area where millions of mentally ill children and adolescents depend on off-label medications. The field of general pediatrics is no different. The fact is that most medications are not tested in children. But, does that mean that
Continue reading »
Recent Comments