Rammya Mathew: Prescribing isn’t a single act—getting it right requires time and effort

Despite working as a GP for close to 10 years, I still find it astonishing how life changing drugs can be. For many of our patients, drugs are the difference between being incapacitated with illness and leading a more “normal” and fulfilling life. The effects of drugs can be tangible and obvious—for example, in patients with inflammatory arthritis, epilepsy, or thyroid disorders. But the effects can also be entirely invisible: we don’t see the amputation, stroke, or heart attack that never happened through the good use of medicines.While therapeutics is such an important and impactful part of what we do as doctors, it surprises me how it’s become so deprioritised in the clinical consultation. How much time do we spend explaining medicines to patients, counselling them about how they work and how they should be taken, adjusted, and monitored? In my experience, this lack of attention to detail is reflected…
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