corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 6904

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Glaser T.
Yes . . . but what solutions?
BMJ 1999 Aug 23; 319:(7208):525
http://bmj.com/cgi/eletters/319/7208/525/a#4335


Abstract:

Dr Dunea offers a succinct summary of the economic realities of primary care prescribing in the US. Solutions are more complex, especially as the cost of a drug to the patient or their third-party payor depends on various invisible factors, such as the deals which have been struck between the HMO and the drug manufacturer. I recently opened two letters in succession – the first asked me to switch a patient from omeprazole to lansoprazole (on cost grounds), the second asked for exactly the opposite switch on exactly the same grounds. Until third-party payors provide us with a computer system that gives us actual drug costs for actual patients we will continue wasting money on expensive drugs or wasting expensive time on fine-tune substitution of one drug for another. In the meantime I suggest that all direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertisements be required to state the average cost of the drugs. Every one of the many patients who has come to me wanting their toenail fungus cured, as in the TV ads, has been horrified once told of the cost – and none have been surprised at their insurer’s reluctance to cover this treatment [full text]

Keywords:
*letter to the editor/United States/switch campaigns/drug costs/HMOs/DTCA/direct-to-consumer advertisingINFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: CONSUMERS AND PATIENTS/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: PRESCRIBING, DRUG USE

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909