The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics
| Discipline | peer-reviewed newsletter |
|---|---|
| Language | English, French, Italian, Spanish and Japanese |
| Publication details | |
| History | first published 1959 |
| Publisher | |
| Standard abbreviations | |
| ISO 4 | Med Lett Drugs Ther |
| Indexing | |
| ISSN | 1523-2859 |
| Links | |
The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics, commonly referred to simply as The Medical Letter, provides independent, unbiased critical evaluations of new drugs and sometimes older drugs when important new information becomes available. Occasionally new non-drug treatments or diagnostic aids are reviewed.
Published biweekly (26 issues/year), the newsletter is available in several languages: English (US and Canadian), French (Canadian French, Swiss French, Belgian French and Standard French), Italian, Spanish, and Japanese.
The Medical Letter is published by The Medical Letter, Inc., which also publishes the monthly Treatment Guidelines from The Medical Letter.
Editorial Process
An expert consultant or one of the editors prepares the preliminary draft using both published and available unpublished studies that are carefully examined, paying special attention to the results of controlled clinical trials.
The preliminary draft is edited and sent to every member of the Advisory Board, to 10-20 other investigators who have clinical and experimental experience with the drug or type of drug or disease under review, to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to the first authors of all the articles cited in the text, to appropriate representatives of the pharmaceutical companies making the drugs under review, and often to companies that make competitor drugs as well.
Many critical observations, suggestions and questions are received from the reviewers and are incorporated into the article during the revision process, and the article is checked and edited to make sure the final appraisal is not only accurate, but also easy to read.
flowchart of the editorial process