Clinical Pharmacy Articles

The Clinical Side: Genetics and details

Educating doctors on new innovations

Nov 1, 2005
By: Neil Berliner
Pharmaceutical Representative

Knowledge of the recent breakthroughs in our understanding of human genetics will be an increasingly valuable resource to provide to your physicians. This exciting bank of information is growing practically from week to week, and it has direct relevance to the medications that are currently available or coming out very soon.

What to learn

The Clinical Side: Assumptions and false comparisons

Handling study objections -- Part 2

Dec 1, 2005
By: Jane Y. Chin
Pharmaceutical Representative

In the October issue of Pharmaceutical Representative, I presented (using the acronym DEAF) two of the four actions sales representatives should avoid when discussing clinical data with physicians: defending the study and extrapolating from the study. In this month's column, I will discuss the final two actions: making assumptions and drawing false comparisons.

The trouble with assumptions

Some assumptions can get you into trouble, especially assumptions about what the physician wants to know when you are communicating clinical information. Here is one example of what I mean:

Doctor: So, what's new?

Whether you are a specialty representative in a primary care field or you're in a niche specialty pharmaceutical field, you are probably focusing your time on the specialists in your area. Specialists are protocol-driven physicians; they are usually at the cutting edge of their therapeutic area and treat "niche" patient populations or rare diseases. At the specialist level, medicine has become as much an art as a science. Dr. Clarence Foster, the director of kidney and pancreas transplant surgery at the University of California in Irvine, is a surgeon who is interested in knowing "who is raising the bar in transplant." For Foster, this may mean steroid-sparing procedures or working with living donors or with kidneys from 60-year-old donors -- in other words, highly experimental approaches to treating a disease.

Modern radiological techniques and digital analysis technologies permit rapid evaluation of the efficacy of o­ncology drugs. Continual review of methods detects flaws promptly, creating the opportunity to take corrective steps.

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Objective - To investigate the scope and nature of pharmacists being refused study leave o­n the grounds of financial, staffing or other reasons. Design - Questionnaire survey containing a mixture of open, closed and Likeart scale questions. Response data were collated and entered o­nto an Epi Info database. Setting - A total of 271 guild-accredited workplace representatives working in hospital and community trusts throughout the UK during March, 1998. Outcome measures - Reasons for study leave being refused; existence and amount of study leave budget. Agreement or disagreement with a range of statements o­n the situation around study leave. For full article Click Here

in Clinical and Experimental Therapeutics Three hundred and nine patients undergoing either cardiac, vascular, or spinal surgery were exposed to bovine thrombin intraoperatively, either in conjunction with FloSeal®, a bovine gelatin-based hemostatic agent, or with Gelfoam® sponge. Patient sera were collected before surgery and at 6 to 8 weeks after surgery and assayed for antibodies to bovine and human thrombin and Factor Va. Prothrombin time was measured for the same samples to determine any clinically significant coagulopathy.

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Faiz Kermani
Applied Clinical Trials, Aug 1, 2004

Jill Weschler
Applied Clinical Trials, May 1, 2003

Kenneth Getz and Deborah Borfitz, CenterWatch (Boston, MA, 2002) 306 pp., $16.95.

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