Since 1992, the government has required that food packages carry a "nutrition facts" label. Now, a team of Dartmouth researchers wants prescriptions to have their own fact boxes, and they are set to receive a $394,333 grant to develop that idea.
Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin, researchers at Dartmouth Medical School and the Veterans Affairs Hospital in White River Junction, Vt., are getting the money in a government effort to combat pharmaceutical company spin.
These boxes would show doctors the pros and cons of drugs they might prescribe without their having to search through the fine print of FDA-mandated drug information or look up clinical trials on the internet.
"The idea is to give them simple tabular data so they can have some sense of the size of the effect of the drug," said Gilbert Welch, another researcher on the project.
Welch said the ultimate goal would be to have the FDA include these boxes with the required insert, which patients get with their medicines or see on the back of magazine ads.
The grant is one of 22 being distributed to medical institutions across the country.
According to Julie Brill of the Vermont Attorney General's Office, the grant winners were selected from more than 30 proposals by an association of state attorneys general in association with outside consultants.
She said they were looking for a variety of possible approaches that would help give doctors unbiased information they might otherwise not have time to get.
"We thought they were worth funding to see how successful they are," Brill said.
The money comes from a 2004 government settlement with Warner-Lambert for marketing the anti-seizure drug Neurontin for unapproved uses. The company, now merged into Pfizer, used methods ranging from simple sales pitches to paid trips to the Atlanta Olympics ostensibly for consultant meetings to promote the drug, according to a Department of Justice release. They allegedly marketed it to the doctors as a treatment for everything from bipolar disorder to migraines.
Government settlements are not a traditional source of research money, but the research team is happy to take advantage of it.
"These things are actually pretty expensive," Welch said. He said these types of grants make up about one-third of researcher salaries and will also help pay patients who took part in the study.
Welch said the plan is to produce a curriculum in booklet and online form that would explain to doctors how to critically evaluate drug information. They will also conduct a trial with local doctors and the standardized patients to see if the boxes really help.
Schwartz and Wolosin, who are married, are on vacation in Australia and were unavailable for comment.
