The following lecture, presented in a required course on nonprescription products, is given to students who are in the terminal year of a Bachelor of Science program. It is heavily laden with facts whose goal is to achieve cognitive learning. However, it also attempts to influence the students’ attitudes, in order to facilitate their growth as caring professionals who can retain a firm scientif...

Although the use of placebo controls and blind assessment to decrease observer bias in clinical trials was introduced at the end of the 19th century, it was not until the second half of the 20th century, coincident with the rapid proliferation of pharmaceutical drug trials, that placebo controls became more widely used. In comparisons of drugs that are administered by different routes, however,...

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) prescription drug advertisements for HIV anti-retrovirals are controversial and have been criticized in the past for including deceptive images and underplaying HIV drug limitations. We sought to describe the state of recent DTC ads for HIV antiretrovirals in popular magazines by performing a content analysis of all complete DTC ads for antiretroviral medications appear...

Legislation proposed in the 100th Congress and debated during the summer of 1987 would cover prescription drug spending by Medicare enrollees after the enrollee had met a deductible. However, at the time that the legislation was proposed, there were no comprehensive estimates of the extent of current expenditures for prescription drugs by that population, nor of the expected cost of the propose...

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fatal medication events in the home Medication safety in the home is an important public health issue. Almost half of all Americans have taken at least one prescription medication in the last month,1 and more than three-quarters have taken an over-the-counter (OTC) medication.2 Almost two-thirds of Americans take at least one medication daily to treat a chronic health problem.3 Most of these me...

This article provides information on likely participation in the Medicare prescription drug plan and expected crowd-out. We use a microsimulation model based on data from the MCBS to estimate the costs and benefits of a Medicare drug plan, including the benefits from reductions in risk. The simulations are repeated using different combinations of benefits and subsidies. In addition, the simulat...

BACKGROUND Federal regulations specify that print advertisements for prescription drugs and biological products must provide a true statement of information "in brief summary" about each advertised product's "side effects, contraindications, and effectiveness." Some of the current approaches to fulfilling the brief summary requirement, although adequate from a regulatory perspective, result in ...