In Japan, it took over 30 years to register the contraceptive Pill, but it took only six months to approve Viagra. The Pill was developed in an academic institution and no large pharmaceutical manufacturer wished to market it. Viagra was developed inside a big company and actively promoted. In the USA, the Pill was almost removed from the market because of widely publicized reports of deaths, b...

CONTEXT Parents are encouraged to be the primary sex educators for their children; however, little is known about the accuracy of parents' views about condoms and oral contraceptives. METHODS Telephone surveys using validated measures provided data on beliefs about the effectiveness, safety and usability of condoms and the pill among 1,069 parents of 13-17-year-olds in Minnesota and Wisconsin...

A certain pill bottle contains m large pills and n small pills initially, where each large pill is equivalent to two small ones. Each day the patient chooses a pill at random, if a small pill is selected, (s)he eats it; otherwise (s)he breaks the selected pill and eats one half, replacing the other half, which thenceforth is considered to be a small pill. (a) What is the expected number of smal...

Substandard, Spurious, Falsely-Labelled, Falsified and Counterfeit (SSFFC) drugs are an emerging public health concern in India. With one of the huge pharmaceutical sectors in the world, India has a varied prevalence of SSSFC drugs ranging from 0.04% to 34% according to various studies. Apart from severe health consequences, SSSFC drugs also weaken community's trust in the health care system. I...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the criteria for prescribing a combination pill for hypertensive patients, and whether the combination pill improves medication adherence. MATERIALS AND METHODS This was a retrospective cohort study, performed in three Italian local health units. We selected all adult subjects who received at least one prescription of antihypertensive drugs between September 1, 2011 a...

INTRODUCTION With an ageing population, end-of-life care is increasing in importance. The present work investigated characteristics and time trends of older peoples' attitudes towards euthanasia and an end-of-life pill. METHODS Three samples aged 64 years or older from the Longitudinal Ageing Study Amsterdam (N=1284 (2001), N=1303 (2005) and N=1245 (2008)) were studied. Respondents were asked...

* Percentages are based on women who used oral contraceptive pills in the past 4 weeks and had sexual intercourse in the past 12 months, who were asked the question “Still thinking about the past 4 weeks, how many pills that you were supposed to take did you miss? Would you say you never missed a pill, missed only one pill, or missed two or more pills?” † Estimates are based on interviews of th...

The impact of pill organizers on pill taking was determined in the Trial of Antioxidant Vitamins C and E (TRACE) Study, a factorial trial of vitamin C and vitamin E supplementation in 184 individuals. Participants were recruited in 1996–1997 and randomized to one of two groups (pill organizer or no organizer) and to one of four supplement groups for 2 months. The pill count (observed/expected X...

Diana Mansour, in her commentary1 in the July 2011 issue of this Journal, pointed out the inadequacy of the wording of the emergency contraception advice in the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority’s Combined Oral Contraceptives (The Pill): When to Start Taking The Pill, and Missed Pill Advice.2 We also need to remember the women who have forgotten one pill in the week before ...

week of the packet the patient should start a new packet after completing the old, that is without having a gap, and will be unprotected for seven days. However, the advice given in the Data sheet compendium is sometimes more cautious but, more worryingly, at times less cautious than the above. As an example, 13 out of 25 data sheets for the combined pill state that a woman is unprotected if a ...