science

The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics

The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics rather than just read about it. In short: The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics (commonly referred to as The Medical Letter) is a peer-reviewed biweekly medical journal providing evaluations of pharmaceutical drugs. It is published in English, French, and Italian.

Key takeaways

The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics (commonly referred to as The Medical Letter) is a peer-reviewed biweekly medical journal providing evaluations of pharmaceutical drugs. It is published in English, French, and Italian. The journal is abstracted and indexed in Index medicus/MEDLINE/PubMed. An offshoot, Treatment Guidelines from the Medical Letter (ISSN 1541-2792) was published from 2002 to 2014, when it was integrated into this journal.

Editorial process Articles for The Medical Letter are drafted by either an editor or external consultant using both published and available unpublished studies that are reviewed for methodological rigor with special attention to the results of clinical trials. A preliminary draft is circulated to every member of the advisory board and 10-20 other investigators with relevant clinical or experimental experience with the article's topic. Drafts are also provided to the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and to all first authors of articles cited in the text. The evaluation of each drug includes a discussion of its efficacy, side effects, and a comparison with older, more established agents. The final version of the paper includes comments from the reviewers and is checked and edited for accuracy and readability.

Publisher The journal is published by The Medical Letter, Inc., a nonprofit organization founded in 1958 by Arthur Kallet and Harold Aaron. It is independent of the pharmaceutical industry, supported by subscriptions, accepts no advertising, and has had a strict policy in place that in order to retain its objectivity, no reprints will be sold to the pharmaceutical industry.

References

External links Official website

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics

In research: The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Academic journals established in 1959, Biweekly journals, English-Italian multilingual journals, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics in simple terms?

Why does The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics.