"In the past it was take a pill every day or have an operation, and there was nothing in between, " says New York gastroenterologist Lawrence Cohen.
Moreover, the Japanese government forbids pharmaceutical companies to give information on the contraceptive use of the pill, so most of the women who take it have little knowledge of the risks and benefits.
If your brain is not functioning properly, and a drug can make it work better, then it makes sense to take the pill.
And features that encourage patients to take their medicine and ensure it is working well should make a pill more valuable to insurers and national health systems, and thus justify higher prices.
LONDON, England (CNN) -- It is a common scenario: you are on medication but you forget to take it -- or worse, you cannot remember whether you took the pill you were due to take an hour ago.
Since forgetfulness is the chief reason for failure of the women's pill (one woman in five who uses it forgets at least once a month to take it), and since there is no reason to believe that men would be any more reliable, an annual injection or implant should be much more effective.
This morning, Netflix announced that it has adopted a poison pill shareholder rights plan as a defense against unfriendly attempts to take control of the company.
Alas, such are the powerful entrenched interests in drugmaking that it will take something stronger than a dose of information to calm the current fever over pill-pricing.
Many of the benefits that had been found for Prempro in the early studies, it turned out, were really just differences between the people who chose to take the pill and those who did not.
Recently, the asthma pill was approved as an allergy medicine, and Merck is betting that it can convince hay fever sufferers to take it instead of antihistamines like Claritin, available cheap and without a prescription from Schering-Plough (nyse: SGP - news - people ), and Zyrtec, sold with a prescription by Pfizer (nyse: PFE - news - people ).
Most travelers arrive in a new time zone, take a sleeping pill to fall asleep at bedtime, drink coffee during the day to stay awake, and wait it out until they feel better, says Charmane Eastman, a professor of behavioral sciences at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, who has devised strategies for people seeking to minimize jet lag.
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