ally bothering them is not cured with a pill, but rather through exercise, physical therapy, or diet changes," Schiff told Reuters Health. Yet many doctors are quick to prescribe a drug, partly because they have limited time to deal with individual patients or because they and their patients have been bombarded with ads from the pharmaceutical industry. As for prevention and non-drug alternatives, Schiff said, "there are no drug reps coming to my office pushing that." In an editorial in the same journal, researchers describe how opioid painkillers like Vicodin and Percocet have become increasingly common without good evidence that they help patients in the long run. The evidence of harm, on the other hand, is clear, write Dr. Deborah Grady of the University of California, San Francisco, and her colleagues. In 2007 alone, for instance, there were nearly 11,500 deaths related to prescription opioids -- "a number greater than that of the combination of deaths from heroin and cocaine," according to the researchers. Some four million prescriptions for long-acting opioids are written every year, with side effects ranging from addiction to constipation to sleepiness. To counter some of this overprescribing, Schiff and colleagues urge doctors to think beyond drugs and to prescribe new ones much more cautiously. When it first hits the market, new medicine has usually only been tested in a few thousand patients, often healthier and younger than the ones doctors see in their offices. That leaves a lot of questions about safety, especially since patients often are taking several drugs at the same time. More than a third of people over 60 take five or more drugs, for instance, and the number of prescriptions continues to rise. But Dr. Lisa Schwartz and her husband Dr. Steven Woloshin, both of Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire, told Reuters Health it's difficult for doctors to get unbiased information about new drugs. "We need to be making this information much