The prescription as final common pathway.

There is an informational void about pharmaceuticals in the training of most doctors, despite the importance of the prescription in medical care. The writing of the prescription is the final common pathway in therapeutic decision making, which involves such diverse forces and disciplines as anthropology, decision science, health economics, ethics, and politics, as well as pharmacology and clinical medicine. Programs to improve the precision and cost-effectiveness of doctors' prescribing must consider all of these factors if pharmacotherapeutics are to be used optimally.