NEW! Our first Gold Reading Guide is now available for Rethinking Medications. The book was written by Dr. Jerry Avorn, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School; the Gold Reading Guide has been prepared by Dr. Avorn and Dr. Nora Jones, a bioethicist and consultant to the Gold Foundation.
See below to download the Gold Reading Guide and request free copies of the book.
The Gold Foundation’s Humanism and Prescribing program aims to help healthcare professionals have better conversations about medications with their patients — open and honest discussions that build trust and lead to more humanistic care.
Prescribing a medication is one of the most crucial – and frequent – acts a clinician performs. At its best, it brings together scientific expertise concerning the benefits and risks of a drug with the patient’s expertise on how that medicine relates to their own symptoms, goals, concerns, understanding, routines, and preferences. These different areas of expertise can and should converge in conversations between prescriber and patient about why a medication is needed, the expected outcomes and possible side effects, whether the drug is affordable, and how it fits into a person’s overall health care and preferences. Ideally, these decisions and interactions bring together the best in scientific knowledge and humanistic patient care, defined by the Gold Foundation as clinically excellent care that is kind, safe, and trustworthy.
The Gold Reading Guide to Rethinking Medications addresses questions that arise constantly in everyday practice: how to weigh a drug’s benefits, risks, burdens, and costs in relation to one another; how to incorporate patient preferences into prescribing decisions; and the role of the clinician when the health system fails their patients.
