单选题
When doctors need information about what dose of
medicine to prescribe, they usually consult a fat blue book called the
Physicians' Desk Reference, or PDR. But the doses recommended in the PDR may be
too high for many people and may cause bad reactions, ranging from dizziness
(头晕) and nausea(恶心)all the way to death, according to an article published last
month in the journal Postgraduate Medicine. For many drugs,
smaller doses would work just as well, with far less risk of bad reactions, said
the author, Jay Cohen, an associate professor at the University of
California. "Side effects drive a lot of people out of
treatment that they need," Dr. Cohen said. "People often gave up trying to treat
their illnesses when they found that the cure was worse than the disease. But if
doctors were to individualize doses for each patient, more people might take
their medicine. " Dr. Cohen said he became aware of the problem
because he met many patients who suffered from side effects even though they had
taken what were supposedly the correct doses of medicine. When Dr. Cohen
consulted medical journals and textbooks, he discovered studies showing that
many patients were helped by smaller than usual amounts of medicine. And
many of his own patients did better with reduced doses. Dosing
guidelines generally tend to be too high because they are based on studies
conducted with limited numbers of patients by drug companies when they are
seeking approval for new products, Dr. Cohen said. For those studies to run
efficiently, doses need to be high enough to show as quickly as possible that
the drug works. But later, after the drug is approved, far more
people take it, sometimes along with other drugs, and individual differences
begin to show up. That information does not always make it into the PDR, Dr.
Cohen said. Dr. Cohen cautioned that patients should not try to
change doses of prescription on their own. He said they needed to work with
doctors to adjust the doses safely.
单选题
According to Dr. Cohen, many patients gave up their treatment because
______.
A. they found no obvious improvement was made after the treatment
B. they thought doctors gave them larger doses than needed for their
illnesses
C. they could not put up with the strong side effects of the drugs
D. they had no confidence in the effectiveness of the drugs