We are all inundated daily with TV commercials listing the long laundry list of possible symptoms and side effects associated with prescription medications. But a new report in the New England Journal of Medicine argues doctors, researchers and drug makers are not listening closely enough to patient reports of symptoms associated with ingesting prescription medication.

Serious or fatal drug reactions can be a cause for medical malpractice in New York City and elsewhere. Additionally, a doctor or medical professional's failure to listen to a patient's symptoms can lead to misdiagnosis or failure to diagnose a serious medical condition.

Direct reporting from patients is rarely even used during drug approval or clinical trials, according to the report's author, Dr. Ethan Basch, of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

If patient input is sought at all, it usually comes from doctors or nurses, who write their own impression of how a patient is feeling, according to an article in the New York Times.

Dr. Basch reports that doctors and nurses "systematically downgrade the severity of patients' symptoms" and sometimes miss side effects altogether. "There is a sensibility among some old-school clinicians that they have a better sense of their patients' experience than patients do themselves," he said.

Once a drug is on the market, the Food and Drug Administration's Medwatch system allows doctors and patients to report adverse symptoms. But it is a passive system that awaits reports of problems instead of proactively seeking input from patients.

So the next time you hear the lengthy list of possible side effects of a prescription drug being advertised on television, keep in mind it might reflect little more than the medical profession's opinions regarding a drug's safety. And, just because a side effect is not listed, certainly does not mean you might not be experiencing a serious adverse reaction to a prescribed medication.