Treatment Guidelines from The Medical Letter

Overview
Treatment Guidelines from The Medical Letter is published monthly (12 issues/year) by The Medical Letter, Inc., which also publishes The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics. The newsletter provides independent, unbiased reviews of drug classes for treatment of some common disorders. A typical issue of Treatment Guidelines contains recommendations for first choice and alternative drugs with assessments of the drugs’ effectiveness, safety and cost.

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An expert consultant or one of the editors prepares the preliminary draft using both published and available unpublished studies that are carefully examined, paying special attention to the results of well controlled clinical trials.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 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. Copies of the original draft are also sent to the drug manufacturers who are responsible for developing these 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