Direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals has led to questions of whether consumers benefit from the additional drug information, or are harmed by being induced to pursue prescriptions that are unnecessary or even dangerous. We conducted an empirical study of the relation between...

In a sign of their increasing frustration with global efforts to ensure that all people everywhere will have access to COVID-19 vaccines, several developing countries have asked other members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to join them in a sweeping waiver of the intellectual property...

Many politicians blame physician dispensing (PD) to increase health care expenditure and to undermine independence of drug prescription and income leading to a suboptimal medication. Therefore, PD is not allowed in most OECD countries. In Switzerland, PD is allowed in some regions depending on...

The aim of this article is to assess how urbanisation affected the traditional medicine of Ethiopia. The data were collected in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from June 1998 to January 1999 by employing anthropological techniques of data collection, namely, participant observation and interview. It is...

While the long-term consequences of unmet child mental health needs are well-documented, out-of-pocket costs remain an important barrier to accessing medication in childhood and adolescence. This paper exploits the implementation of a public drug insurance program in Québec, Canada, to estimate...

This paper deals with the question how to model health effects after the cessation of a randomised controlled trial (RCT). Using clinical trial data on severe congestive heart failure patients we illustrate how survival beyond the cessation of a RCT can be predicted based on parametric survival...

The cost-effectiveness of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) based on a societal perspective is reassessed based on new medical evidence found in the Women's Health Initiative (WHI). Within a model framework using an individual state transition model the cost-effectiveness of 50-60 year old women...

This was the first paper to discuss the benefits of direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising. It was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1985. The authors are Alison Masson (AKA Alison Keith) and Paul H. Rubin, and the paper was written when the authors were economists at the Federal...

Objective: To estimate the cost-effectiveness of local vs. oral antibiotic in non-pregnant women with vaginal discharge suggestive of bacterial vaginosis.Methods: We compared four combinations of antibiotics for the first option and for the treatment of clinical failure: vaginal clindamycin and...

This is an introduction to a new development in the international arena that poses a threat to the ability of countries to tailor patent and regulatory laws to promote access to medicine. Basically, certain international agreements permit foreign companies to sue a country for compensation if...