corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14770

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Kish-Doto J, Evans WD, Squire C, Williams P, Ranney LM, Melvin CL.
Patterns of prescribing antiepileptic drugs for bipolar disorder.
J Psychiatr Pract. 2008 Mar; 14:35-43.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19034208


Abstract:

Off-label use of medications is the subject of great debate. Prescribing is influenced by a number of factors, including peer recommendations, pharmaceutical industry marketing, and evidence-based drug effectiveness reports. Understanding prescribing patterns for a particular drug class can inform efforts to provide fair and balanced information to prescribers. This study investigated four dimensions of psychiatrists’ prescribing practices for antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) for bipolar disorder: 1) psychiatrists’ current use of AEDs, 2) their actual and preferred sources of information on AEDs, 3) their knowledge about the Neurontin lawsuit, and 4) their reactions to sample marketing campaign materials, including key messages from an evidence-based report on the topic. Qualitative methods, including telephone and in-person focus groups and in-depth interviews, were used to explore these dimensions. We found that psychiatrists prescribe AEDs for off-label use, but that they are not using gabapentin as a primary treatment for bipolar disorder. The psychiatrists also reported that they obtained their information about AEDs from professional journals, colleagues, and pharmaceutical representatives. The psychiatrists were asked to review a set of four key messages derived from an evidence-based report on the use of AEDs to treat bipolar disorder. They had misconceptions about the efficacy of the draft messages as they were written, stating that they were oversimplified and erroneous. The messages were revised based on the participants’ feedback. However, the core findings from the evidence-based report remained unchanged. Recommendations for developing and disseminating messages and materials for a future corrective marketing campaign to provide fair and balanced information to physicians about gabapentin and other AEDs are discussed.

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909