benefit for diabetes patients who do not require insulin. Under the Ontario Public Drug Programs (OPDP), these patients have a 200-400 strip/year limit, whereas patients who require insulin can receive up to 3,000 strips annually. The policy intent was not to change BGTS utilization for insulin patients; however, concerns exist around potential negative impacts on diabetes management. The objec...

abstract prescribing behavior of physicians affected by many factors. the present study is aimed at discovering the simultaneous effects of the evaluated factors (including: price, promotion and demographic characteristics of physicians) and quantification of these effects. in order to estimate these effects, fluvoxamine (an antidepressant drug) was selected and the model was figured out by pan...

The most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health showed a continuing trend in the nonmedical use of prescription medications, notably opioid analgesics, which accounted for 75% of prescription drug non-medical use in 2006. In 2006, in response to this growing “pharmacoepidemic,” the Office of National Drug Control Policy set a goal of reducing past month prescription drug abuse by 15% ove...

In Back to First Principles: A New Model for the Regulation of Drug Promotion, Alan Bennett and co-authors rightly argue that it is time for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to reconsider its scheme for regulating prescription drug promotion.1 Bennett and his co-authors assert that the FDA’s framework for overseeing prescriptiondrug promotion is outdated because itwas developedover 5...

BACKGROUND The prescription drug benefit is commonly designed and managed as a stand-alone health insurance product without consideration of how the design of other medical benefits may impact its use. OBJECTIVE To determine the effects of member cost (copayment/coinsurance) increases on the relationship between the use of physician office visits and the type/tier of prescription medication p...

US Office-Based Physicians To the Editor: We read with great interest the article by Nelson and Knapp1 on the trends of antihypertensive therapy by US office-based physicians. Their findings are clearly significant, but some of their conclusions are not supported by the data presented. The authors state that “physician antihypertensive drug prescribing was generally consistent with the basic an...

introduction: irrational drug prescription is a controversial issue around the world that inter-feres not only with the patient's life but also with the society and economy. despite few studies, there is no enough data on the prescription ha bits of dental practitioners. so, we aimed at eva luating the same issue in rasht, iran. materials and methods: this cross-sectional re-trospective st...

Professor O'Reilly's study of recent drug review legislation applies a historical and holistic view of promotion practices for unapproved uses of prescription drugs. He faults Congress for moving public health protections away from a strictly protective mode and toward assistance to drug marketers. He argues that the adverse health consequences of "off-label" promotion of drugs are not well und...