Patty Wight
npr.org
Originally posted February 13, 2018
The maker of OxyContin, one of the most prescribed and aggressively marketed opioid painkillers, will no longer tout the drug or any other opioids to doctors.
The announcement, made Saturday, came as drugmaker Purdue Pharma faces lawsuits for deceptive marketing brought by cities and counties across the U.S., including several in Maine. The company said it's cutting its U.S. sales force by more than half.
Just how important are these steps against the backdrop of a raging opioid epidemic that took the lives of more than 300 Maine residents in 2016, and accounted for more than 42,000 deaths nationwide?
"They're 20 years late to the game," says Dr. Noah Nesin, a family physician and vice president of medical affairs at Penobscot Community Health Care.
Nesin says even after Purdue Pharma paid $600 million in fines about a decade ago for misleading doctors and regulators about the risks opioids posed for addiction and abuse, it continued marketing them.
The article is here.
Showing posts with label Financial Bias. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Financial Bias. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 13, 2018
Monday, July 10, 2017
Big Pharma gives your doctor gifts. Then your doctor gives you Big Pharma’s drugs
Nicole Van Groningen
The Washington Post
Originally posted June 13, 2017
Here is an excerpt:
The losers in this pharmaceutical industry-physician interaction are, of course, patients. The high costs of branded drugs are revenue to drug companies, but out-of-pocket expenses to health-care consumers. Almost a quarter of Americans who take prescription drugs report that they have difficulty affording their medications, and the high costs of these drugs is a leading reason that patients can’t adhere to them. Most branded drugs offer minimal — if any — benefit over generic formulations. And if doctors prescribe brand-name drugs that are prohibitively more expensive than generic options, patients might forgo the medications altogether — causing greater harm.
On a national scale, the financial burden imposed by branded drugs is enormous. Current estimates place our prescription drug spending at more than $400 billion annually, and branded drugs are almost entirely to blame: Though they constitute only 10 percent of prescriptions, they account for 72 percent of total drug spending. Even modest reductions in our use of branded prescription drugs — on par with the roughly 8 percent relative reduction seen in the JAMA study — could translate to billions of dollars in national health-care savings.
The article is here.
The Washington Post
Originally posted June 13, 2017
Here is an excerpt:
The losers in this pharmaceutical industry-physician interaction are, of course, patients. The high costs of branded drugs are revenue to drug companies, but out-of-pocket expenses to health-care consumers. Almost a quarter of Americans who take prescription drugs report that they have difficulty affording their medications, and the high costs of these drugs is a leading reason that patients can’t adhere to them. Most branded drugs offer minimal — if any — benefit over generic formulations. And if doctors prescribe brand-name drugs that are prohibitively more expensive than generic options, patients might forgo the medications altogether — causing greater harm.
On a national scale, the financial burden imposed by branded drugs is enormous. Current estimates place our prescription drug spending at more than $400 billion annually, and branded drugs are almost entirely to blame: Though they constitute only 10 percent of prescriptions, they account for 72 percent of total drug spending. Even modest reductions in our use of branded prescription drugs — on par with the roughly 8 percent relative reduction seen in the JAMA study — could translate to billions of dollars in national health-care savings.
The article is here.
Thursday, June 4, 2015
Understanding Bias — The Case for Careful Study
Lisa Rosenbaum
N Engl J Med 2015; 372:1959-1963
May 14, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
Whether our judgments are motivated by fatigue, hunger, institutional norms, the diagnosis of the last patient we saw, or a memory of a patient who died, we are all biased in countless subtle ways. Teasing out the relative effects of any of these other biases is nearly impossible. You can’t exactly randomly assign some physicians to being motivated by the pursuit of tenure, others by ideology, others by the possibility of future stock returns, and others by just wanting to be really good doctors. The difficulty of measuring these other motivations, however, creates the problem that plagues many quality-improvement efforts: we go after only what we can count. It is easy to count the dollars industry pays doctors, but this ease of measurement obscures two key questions: Does the money introduce a bias that undermines scientific integrity? And by focusing on these pecuniary biases, are we overlooking others that are equally powerful?
The entire article is here.
N Engl J Med 2015; 372:1959-1963
May 14, 2015
Here is an excerpt:
Whether our judgments are motivated by fatigue, hunger, institutional norms, the diagnosis of the last patient we saw, or a memory of a patient who died, we are all biased in countless subtle ways. Teasing out the relative effects of any of these other biases is nearly impossible. You can’t exactly randomly assign some physicians to being motivated by the pursuit of tenure, others by ideology, others by the possibility of future stock returns, and others by just wanting to be really good doctors. The difficulty of measuring these other motivations, however, creates the problem that plagues many quality-improvement efforts: we go after only what we can count. It is easy to count the dollars industry pays doctors, but this ease of measurement obscures two key questions: Does the money introduce a bias that undermines scientific integrity? And by focusing on these pecuniary biases, are we overlooking others that are equally powerful?
The entire article is here.
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