The cover story in this edition is “Magic in a Bottle - pills prescriptions and the promise of health”. What we see in Southasia today is a corporate health-care model imposed on a population that mostly has little or no access to food, clean water and sanitation. But it is the very prevalence of widespread disease that makes the region a haven for the clinical testing of new drugs, even as endemic poverty makes volunteers willingly submit to potentially hazardous trials, for a price. Articles in this issue examine the mythmaking around the efficacy of drugs, and look at what it takes for patients to make informed decisions about the hazards of the medicines they ingest. Alongside, antibiotic resistance, an outcome of the over and inappropriate use of drugs, is a growing concern, where communities will need to rise and take their health in their own hands. The other articles in this issue is “Doctoring the evidence in Sri Lanka” by Rajan Hoole who talks about Colombo's recent detention of an apparently coerced recantation by several Tamil doctors who had reported high civilian casualties is a potential example of the government's determination to rewrite the final days of the civil war.