Thursday, January 14, 2010

Colbert Takes on Cephalon’s Nuvigil

In this brief video clip, Dr. Stephen T. Colbert discusses alternatives to Cephalon’s (NASDAQ: CEPH) Nuvigil, including potential competitor VaxaStare from Prescott Pharmaceuticals. Funny.

Prescott Pharmaceuticals stands by its Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm. Second, get a good lawyer.




Click here to watch the entire Cheating Death segment, which also covers Alzheimer's and the Female Libido.

4 comments:

  1. Adam - this was funny. It's an example of how were seem over medicated solely for the purpose of profiting drug manufacturers. In some cases, when a “re-active” physician consults their patient – it’s implanted in the back of their minds to remember each pharmaceutical representatives presentation on the last drug overview and if that newest elixir is the answer to covering the problem up instead of solving the problem once and for all with traditional methods. The notion that Americans are being over-diagnosed and overmedicated for exaggerated or even fictitious mental disorders has now become one of the defining tropes of our era.

    This storyline persists despite the fact that government research has repeatedly shown that most adults and children with health issues don’t get the specialized help that they need. It persists despite the fact that there’s really no way to meaningfully evaluate the degree of over-diagnosis and medication unique to our era, because to do so is essentially to look at the current era in a vacuum.
    Soaring drug company profits and obnoxious direct to consumer advertising seem to indicate that everyone around us is popping pills like mad.

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  2. If Colbert wanted to talk about Nuvigil, he could have dug a little deeper to come up with an even better story. Nuvigl is basically a rehashed version of Cephalon's Provigl, which is scheduled to come out generically soon.

    Cephalon has quietly been jacking up the price of Provigil over the last few years, trying to push patients over to Nuvigl. The Wall Street Journal ran an article on this fourteen months ago:

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122696875770635577.html

    Provigil is even more expensive now than it was back then. In fact, for patients without insurance, it's prohibitively expensive.

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  3. "Restless Eyelid Syndrome" -- love it!!

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