The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics
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. The Medical Letter is well known as the "Gold Standard" within the medical community for new drug review.
The Medical Letter has a print and electronic circulation of well over 450,000 subscribers in 88 countries worldwide.
Published biweekly (26 issues/year), the newsletter is available in several languages: English (US and Canadian editions), French (Canadian and European editions), Italian, Chinese, and Spanish.The Medical Letter is also available as an electronic site license for institutions such as medical schools, hospitals and group practices.
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An expert consultant or one of the editors prepares the preliminary draft using both published and available unpublished studies that are carefully examined, paying special attention to the results of well controlled clinical trials.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 agents of the pharmaceutical companies making the drugs under review, and to drug companies that make similar compounds.
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