Saturday, April 19, 2008

The Effect of Direct-to-Patient Advertising on a Drug's Market Share




This is simply a graphics-driven reproduction of the data (those tiny Canadian Zetia pills are almost entirely invisible, against the jumbo-US Zetia pills -- so, you'll need to look closely, and click the image, to see it in enlarged mode!) on Lines 3, and 10, in Columns 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10, of Table 2 of this study, just-released in the New England Journal of Medicine (for the April 24, 2008 printed edition).

The study was authored by Dr. Harlan Krumholz, of Yale University, using IMS Data-sets for the relevant years/countries. Click the above to enlarge it -- res ipsa, no? "Res ispa loquitur. . . ."

Or, in Judge Friendly's more pedestrian formulation of it -- "Some times, to ask the question, is to answer it. . . ." [Interestingly, apparently Judge Friendly was unwittingly quoting Sir Frederick Douglass (letter dated December 1, 1845, at paragraph 4). The literal, from the Latin, is "The thing speaks for itself."]

No comments: