Reddit mentions of Physicians' Desk Reference, 66th Edition

This is the Physician's Desk Reference, a summary of every major drug (not all drugs, just the more than a thousand popular ones) that was on the market in the US four years ago. Your doctor probably has a copy. There's no way they memorized all 3000 pages of that book. I guess they could have a pharmacy in the office, but there's a lot of doctors and they don't all need to maintain their own private pharmacy.

> Other drugs to NOT mix with Cipro, include antinflammatory drugs like Ibuprofen and anti-diarrhea meds. He prescribed me a squits med.

BTW... my personal "standard practice" is that I NEVER, EVER take any medication without looking up the DETAILED info on it -- something that is EASY to do now with the internet -- but which I was doing way back in the 1980's (long before the internet ) initially by visiting the library to use & then later buying my own "PDR: Physician Desk Reference" guide to meds... which includes info not only on what "side effects" are known, but also what contraindations exist (drug interactions, etc) AND what "supervision/testing" is SUPPOSED to be done (regardless of side effect symptom complaints) for people ON certain medications.

And then of course it is a "judgement call" ON MY PART as to whether I will take on the risk... whether the medication's (potential) positives are worth the (possibility) of the negatives.

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>I'd far rather he'd said "Let me just Google this a minute" and bloody checked first.

Well thing of it is you cannot trust someone else to do that -- you really DO have to do it yourself -- after all, who has MORE at stake in your health?

To the doc, you are just patient number #4,879... and there is (in some ways of understandable "necessity"*) a sort of ingrained "you win some, you lose some" indifference to the fate of patients.

Problem is that "indifference" -- while some level of it is necessary (again *) -- can easily combine with other priorities (ego, sloppiness, laziness, incompetence, even money, etc) such that it becomes either negligent or outright harmful. (In fact MOST of the history of "medicine" is rife with doctors doing more harm than good... and it is a modern "arrogance" to believe THAT state of things has been entirely changed, or that the potential for "harm" has been entirely "done away with"; because it hasn't, it most definitely hasn't.)

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* That is to say, regardless of their actual skill -- or their "ego-mania" (or alternately their "humility" -- doctors are NOT "all-powerful"... it is inevitable that they WILL "lose" patients (i.e. people get sick/injured and SOME of them will die).

Doctors CANNOT always prevent that, in fact for the most part, in the lion's share of cases whether a patient "recovers" is MORE dependent upon the patients' own body: immune system & overall health; than it is on anything the doctor does or does not do; at best some intervention or treatment assists the body, at worst it harms/kills, and very often the effect is largely irrelevant (i.e. the patient would have recovered -- or died -- regardless).

Moreover, doctors CANNOT become so "invested" in the health of any particular patient that they become "devastated" by the person's sickness/death -- if and when they do so -- well, they effectively destroy their own ability to function (and THAT doesn't help anyone either).