PURPOSE American television viewers see as many as 16 hours of prescription drug advertisements (ads) each year, yet no research has examined how television ads attempt to influence consumers. This information is important, because ads may not meet their educational potential, possibly prompting consumers to request prescriptions that are clinically inappropriate or more expensive than equally ...

Comparing data from both the 1999 MCBS and drug utilization data supplied by the survey respondents' pharmacies, the author details the methods used to determine the level of misreporting of drug expenditures in the MCBS. Findings suggest that prescription drug expenditures are underreported by 17 percent and the number of prescriptions used is underreported by 17.7 percent. The data also ident...

Local rural pharmacies provide essential pharmacy and clinical services to their communities. Pharmacists play a critical role in the continuum of care for rural residents, and the loss of a local pharmacy may impact access to prescription drugs and clinical care. This policy brief identifies factors that contributed to the closing of six pharmacies and describes how the affected communities ad...

In creating the Medicare prescription drug benefit and stipulating that it be managed by private-sector prescription drug insurance plans, Congress opened a huge business opportunity for pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). Although hardly noticed by the general public, PBMs already administer prescription drug benefits for nearly everyone with employer coverage and for many Medicaid recipients. T...

Despite concerns about reporting biases and interpretation, self-assessed health (SAH) remains the measure of health most used by researchers, in part reflecting its ease of collection and in part the observed correlation between SAH and objective measures of health. Using a unique Australian data set, which consists of survey data linked to administrative individual medical records, we present...

Allotey P, Reidpath DD, Elisha D. ‘‘Social medication’’ and the control of children: a qualitative study of over-the-counter medication among Australian children. Pediatrics 2004;114:e378–83. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....

Drug advertisements for prescription drugs gathered from private clinics and hospitals in southern Brazil were analyzed. None of the 127 advertisement inserts that were analyzed complied with all the criteria specified by Brazilian legislation. The official Brazilian generic drug name was present in 95% of the advertisements, but always in finer and/or fainter print. With regard to the WHO ethi...

P rescription drugs are playing an increasingly greater role in the health care delivery system: not only are more Americans using prescription medicines than ever before, but the number of prescriptions per user has increased as has the number of days of therapy per prescription. Between 1977 and 1998, the proportion of Americans taking at least one prescription rose from 58 to 66 percent and ...