{"id":738,"date":"2010-12-23T20:26:33","date_gmt":"2010-12-24T04:26:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/?p=738"},"modified":"2011-07-06T18:31:36","modified_gmt":"2011-07-07T02:31:36","slug":"doctors-and-smart-drugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/2010\/12\/23\/doctors-and-smart-drugs\/","title":{"rendered":"Doctors and Smart Drugs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.plosone.org\/article\/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0014322\">Doctors are more willing to prescribe Viagra than cognitive enhancement drugs<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Why?<\/p>\n<p>The report wonders whether it&#8217;s due to conservative tendencies among doctors. But Viagra and Modafinil both became available in the U.S. in 1998. Conservatism doesn&#8217;t explain why doctors are slower to accept Modafinil than Viagra. Although maybe combined with more patients asking for Viagra it would be plausible.<\/p>\n<p>Concern over side effects might explain why doctors are less comfortable with Ritalin, but not why three different cognitive enhancing drugs all produced similar comfort levels &#8211; about half that of Viagra. And I see no signs that Modafinil is much riskier than Viagra.<\/p>\n<p>Could it be concern that Viagra has an equalizing effect (making people more normal), whereas cognitive enhancers make people who can afford them smarter than the less fortunate? Partly &#8211; doctors were more willing to prescribe cognitive enhancers for older patients than younger ones. But the cross-drug comparisons were done for a case where &#8220;the patient was a 40-year-old reporting symptoms consistent with the label indications for the respective drug&#8221;. I&#8217;m pretty sure the label indications describe a patient who is functioning well below normal.<\/p>\n<p>The obvious conclusion part of what&#8217;s happening is that doctors believe sex produces larger benefits than cognitive enhancement. If we ignore potentially important externalities such as sexually transmitted diseases versus improved science\/technology (would doctors admit to doing that?), I could make a decent case for sex being more valuable. There&#8217;s no shortage of evidence that sex makes people happy, whereas there seems to be little or no correlation between cognitive ability and happiness. <\/p>\n<p>(HT <a href=\"http:\/\/yourbrainondrugs.net\/2010\/12\/doctors-smart-drugs\/\">YourBrainonDrugs.net<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Doctors are more willing to prescribe Viagra than cognitive enhancement drugs. Why? The report wonders whether it&#8217;s due to conservative tendencies among doctors. But Viagra and Modafinil both became available in the U.S. in 1998. Conservatism doesn&#8217;t explain why doctors are slower to accept Modafinil than Viagra. Although maybe combined with more patients asking for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[29,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-mind"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p80O1l-bU","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=738"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":783,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738\/revisions\/783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}