Abstract
This Dissertation and Portfolio address the role that United States law should play in order to mitigate physicians’ biased prescribing practices and ensure more careful and knowledgeable decision-making for safer patient care. Drawing on literature in medicine, sociology, psychology, responsive regulation theory, and law, I highlight this important gap in American legislative frameworks and indeed in legal scholarship surrounding medicines. I underscore key limitations in the current federal, state, and nongovernment regulatory regime surrounding prescribing requirements and medicines information-sharing, and I draw on anti-epilepsy drugs that give color and urgency to the issue of prescription bias given their pronounced risks for adverse drug reactions.This Dissertation identifies how societal influences distort medical reasoning and lead to unsafe biased prescribing, and it considers limitations in the current regulatory regime surrounding prescribing, physicians’ medicines knowledge, and mitigating prescription bias. Through critical analysis of regulatory literature, I conclude by offering meticulous policy recommendations for improving drug information-transparency and physicians’ medicines information resources—the appropriate means of counteracting social influences, overcoming law’s limitations, and mitigating prescription bias to ensure safer patient care. Responsive federal statutory law is the appropriate locus for implementing my recommendations because it ensures consistent prescribing capabilities among physicians, and it cultivates expansion of existing nationally-regulated programs for medications data-sharing.
| Date of Award | Dec 2019 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
|
| Supervisor | Ciarán O'Kelly (Supervisor) & Thérèse Murphy (Supervisor) |