Objectives This paper investigates the pricing strategy (perfect flat pricing, perfect monotonic pricing, intermediate) used for multiple dosage medications listed in the Ontario Drug Benefit Formulary.Methods All multiple dosage solid medications containing a single active ingredient newly...

Cambodia is expected to graduate from Least Developed Country status soon, at which time it will be required to make patents available for pharmaceutical products and processes to meet its obligations under the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Given its...

Over the past 35 years, patients have suffered from a largely hidden epidemic of side effects from drugs that usually have few offsetting benefits. The pharmaceutical industry has corrupted the practice of medicine through its influence over what drugs are developed, how they are tested, and how...

Data indicate that the widely touted “innovation crisis” in pharmaceuticals is a myth. The real innovation crisis, say Donald Light and Joel Lexchin, stems from current incentives that reward companies for developing large numbers of new drugs with few clinical advantages over existing ones

Navigating the Evidence: Communicating Canadian Health Policy in the Media is a compilation of the EvidenceNetwork commentaries published in major newspapers in 2014, written by experts in the health policy field. These Op-Eds highlight the most recent evidence on a wide range of topics,...

Medicine regulators rely on pivotal clinical trials to make decisions about approving a new drug, but little is known about how they judge whether pivotal trials justify the approval of new drugs. We explore this issue by looking at the positions of 3 major regulators: the European Medicines...

Prompt and affordable access to essential medicines is a component of almost all domestic and global public health models. As is now well known, the availability and costs of both brand and generic drugs is a function of traditional patent law incentives. Less known, however, is that generic...

Canadian drug laws and regulations have been made increasingly more stringent over the past 40 years and are now considered among the strictest in the world. However, there are still major gaps in the Canadian regulatory process. These deficiencies exist primarily in the areas of the evaluation...

Spending on direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) in the US rapidly increased from $US150 million in 1992 to $US1.2 billion in 1998 (to the end of November). Despite this level of expenditure, there is no literature on how DTCA affects patients' level of knowledge about medications, physician...