Physician Prescribing Behavior for NSAIDs

What determines which NSAIDs physicians prescribe? According to the Naik et al. (2009) the following six factors are the most important: Direct Marketing by Pharmaceutical Reps. Patient requests for medication, often driven by direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising. Habits formed during medical school. Often, these habits are influenced by drug rep visits while the physician was in…

Assorted Links

The latest edition of the Health Wonk Review is up at Pizaazz. Regina Herzlinger likes the Swiss health care system.  Maggie Mahar doesn’t. One reason personal health records may fail: “If you know anything about how doctors bill, we use all kinds of codes and associations for those codes that can easily be misinterpreted by…

Convex States

What is a convex set?  An object is convex if for every pair of points within the object, every point on the straight line segment that joins them is also within the object.  Mathematically, we can define a convex set as follows. C is a convex set if: αx+(1-α)y ∈ C, ∀ α ∈ [0,1], ∀ x,y ∈ C. In other words, this…

Why have disability rates decreased?

“Although the evidence was mixed for the 1980s and it is difficult to pinpoint when in the 1990s the decline began, during the mid- and late 1990s, the panel found consistent declines on the order of  0-2.5% per year for two commonly used measures in the disability literature: difficulty with daily activities and help with…

Adaptive Partial Drug Approval

Currently the FDA requires that drug companies conduct 3 phases in order to secure the approval of a pharmaceutical. These are: Phase I. These are smaller (20-80 participants), clinical trials which determine a drug’s safety and pharmacologic properties among healthy volunteers. Phase II. This phase tests a drug’s efficacy and optimal dosage. Typically 100-300 individuals…