ArticleFrontiers in pharmacology2020
The "Square Box": Therapeutic Equivalence as a Foundation of the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines.
Article in Frontiers in pharmacology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Adsorptive removal of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs from wastewater samples using modified activated carbon derived from potato peels.BMC chemistry · 2026Article
- Parkinson disease treatments on national essential medicines lists, African Region.Bulletin of the World Health Organization · 2025Article
- Medicines not recommended for inclusion in the who essential medicines list: a retrospective observational study.Frontiers in medicine · 2025Article
- Ground-breaking change to the mental health section of the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines: implications for low- and middle-income countries.Epidemiology and psychiatric sciences · 2024Article
- GRADE Concept 7: Issues and Insights Linking Guideline Recommendations to Trustworthy Essential Medicine Lists.Journal of clinical epidemiology · 2024Article
- Uptake of orphan drugs in the WHO essential medicines lists.Bulletin of the World Health Organization · 2024Article
- Essential medicines for mental disorders: comparison of 121 national lists with WHO recommendations.Archives of public health = Archives belges de sante publique · 2023Article
- Mapping the selection, availability, price and affordability of essential medicines for mental health conditions at a global level.Epidemiology and psychiatric sciences · 2022Article
- Article
- Global access to affordable direct oral anticoagulants.Bulletin of the World Health Organization · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Every two years, the World Health Organization (WHO) updates its Model List of Essential Medicines, intended as a guide for countries to adopt or adapt in accordance with local priorities and treatment guidelines, for the development of national essential medicines lists. When more than one therapeutic option is available for a given indication, the WHO Model List often includes a single medicine as representative of a group of equivalent and interchangeable medicines. The representative medicine of that group is listed with an accompanying 'square box' symbol. The intended purpose of the square box is to highlight pharmacological classes or groups of medicines for which countries, institutions and health professionals can assume homogeneous therapeutic efficacy and safety and select the most appropriate single medicine based on price, local availability, and acceptability. Though this concept of therapeutic equivalence within a therapeutic class has been endorsed by most authoritative textbooks of pharmacology since
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.