Removal of thioridazine from primary care formulary will result in prescribing vacuum

EDITOR—Recently the Committee on the Safety of Medicines recommended that general practitioners should not prescribe thioridazine.1 It recommended that prescribing should be limited to second line treatment in schizophrenia and that prescription should be initiated only by a consultant psychiatrist. The reason was that the drug was thought to be a cause of very rare cardiac deaths by widening the QT interval in an electrocardiogram, leading to a greater risk of developing arrhythmias. The evidence base to substantiate this decision is not, …