Word: tpa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...heart drug hit the market in 1987 in a blinding flash of pitchmen, promotion and public relations hoo-ha. The product of biotech breakthroughs, TPA was touted as clearly superior to the competition, a clot-busting drug called streptokinase, on the market for 15 years. Though TPA (for tissue plasminogen activator) is 10 times as expensive as the older drug, the majority of U.S. doctors bought the pitch, and the new drug became the favored method of breaking up clots in heart-attack victims. Then last week an international team of researchers reported what some doctors had suspected all along...
...saga of TPA is a glaring example of what some experts believe is a pervasive problem in American health care: how high-pressure marketing tactics by drug companies combine with the lure of a glamorous high-tech product to persuade doctors to adopt the latest medication, even when it offers no clear advantage. "Doctors are enamored of new technologies," says Dr. Stephen Schondelmeyer, director of the Pharmaceutical Economics Research Institute at Purdue University. "We have this attraction to 'new is better,' even though that is not always true...