Mr. Gaudio said his pharmacy filled more prescriptions for veterinarian needs than for people.
Gilead Sciences said yesterday that second-quarter sales soared as doctors wrote more prescriptions for its Viread AIDS drug.
But by February of this year, doctors had begun writing more prescriptions for Avandia than for Rezulin.
Armed with such data, a drug sales representative can pressure a doctor to write more prescriptions for a name-brand medicine or fewer orders for a competitor's drug.
The memo, dated June 26 , 1995 said that in the Northeast, doctors attending the dinners wrote 70percentt more prescriptions for Neurontin than doctors who did not attend.
Sales from a joint venture with Japan's Takeda Chemical Industries increased 25percentto to $809 million, with more prescriptions for the ulcer drug Prevacid.
"We defined exposure to antidepressants as the mother having had one or more prescriptions for antidepressants filled during the second or third trimester of the pregnancy.
Not only does it hope to fill more prescriptions for newly insured people, but it also wants to provide people with reimbursable health-care services, like what they might get at a doctor's office.
Two dozen products accounted for half the increase, which occurred not just because drugs are becoming more expensive but because doctors are writing many more prescriptions for higher-cost drugs, the study said.
As the political debate continues on how to provide a prescription drug benefit for the elderly, more doctors are writing more prescriptions for more expensive drugs that sometimes are not even taken by our frail patients.
His opposition began nearly a decade ago, he recalled, when a representative from TAP Pharmaceutical Products let slip during a sales call that Dr. Abramson wrote more prescriptions for Prevacid, a treatment for acid reflux, than any other doctor in the state.
