Johns Hopkins Health Alerts Topic Page:
Prescription Drugs
View All Prescription Drugs Health Alerts • View All Prescription Drugs Special Reports
How do medications work in the body? What is a lifestyle drug? How are prescription medications created and tested? What is an off-label prescription? Why do generic drugs cost less? What is drug flipping?
You’ll learn the answers to these and many other important questions here, in the Prescription Drugs topic section. In this time of managed care and competing multimedia advertising, it is often difficult to distinguish solid, information from overblown hype.
We cannot tell you which medications are best for you—your doctor and pharmacist will offer guidance in using your own prescription drugs safely and cost-effectively. What you will learn from this section will help you to ask the right questions, and have a better understanding of the answers.
Today’s abundance of prescription drugs offers longer and healthier lives to millions of us who are affected by diabetes, coronary heart disease, arthritis, prostate cancer, and many other long-term medical conditions. But these benefits come with an important caveat: Used inappropriately, prescription drugs may not help very much, and can even cause harm.
How Johns Hopkins can help. Johns Hopkins Medicine is ideally positioned to help you become a more informed consumer of prescription drugs. We’re ranked No. 1 by U.S. News and World Report's annual Rankings of American hospitals.
- Drawing on the expertise of Brent G. Petty, M.D., Associate Professor, Division of Clinical Pharmacology and General Internal Medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and other leading researchers at Johns Hopkins, this Prescription Drugs topic area reports on a wide-range of important subjects, including: aging and the risks of multiple drug use, the promise of pharmacogenomics, medication-related weight gain and what you can do about it, ordering drugs from Canada safely, and more.
