Monday, August 4, 2014

Pharmacy monographs and an illusory duty of care

We are sometime not sure what to make of pharmacy monographs.  You know what we mean.  Those sheets that pharmacists print out and give us with our prescriptions.  They are not drug labeling, and they are not medication guides.  They are summaries intended for patient perusal, with information taken from the labeling, but digested in a fashion intended for the lay reader.  Notably, the FDA has not asserted any prerogative to review and approve pharmacy monographs, leaving publishers essentially self-regulated under an FDA action plan.
From time to time, we are surprised when a plaintiff produces a pharmacy monograph in discovery, one that he or she received from the pharmacy and has saved.  (We have not seen the data, but we expect that people who save pharmacy monographs are the same people who have their utility bills from the mid 1990s and who know where the instructions and warranties are for all their household appliances.)  But even when this happens, we are unsure how the monographs help us.  The parties we represent – drug manufacturers – do not publish these things, and they generally don’t have any duty to warn patients anyway
continue to read here

No comments: