doctor disease

Marco Anglesio mpa at the-wire.com
Fri May 11 09:42:46 PDT 2001


On Fri, 11 May 2001, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> That a drug was 'misprescribed' can only be known ex post facto. So using
> the hindisght knowledge of judging a decision-maker who faces a quite
> serious 'information asymmetry' problem (i.e. she does not know for sure

Not to mention that many drugs are used for conditions which are not mentioned on the label. This is known as off-label usage. It is actually quite common, and even well-established off-label uses take quite a while to make it onto the mandated patient monograph.

A case in point: tegretol (carbamazepine), which was first developed for the treatment of epilepsy. It has been used for the treatment of manic depression since the early 1970's, but only recently (five years ago or thereabouts) was manic depression added to the patient monograph distributed in the US.

This would tend to make any survey drawing conclusions of this type suspect. I'd have to read the article proper to be sure, of course.

Marco

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