Consumer Focused Health

As we go down the path to consumerism, its important to remember that when we put consumers in control, we don’t have top-down control over what goes on to be successful. In an environment where Furby is wildly popular one year (selling at 10X multiples of the retail price), and neglected the next, rating it against clinical studies of childhood satisfaction seem wildly irrelevant.

The thought was triggered as I was reading the NYTimes article on sleep drugs. The title was: Sleep drugs found only mildly effective, but wildly popular.

American consumers spend $4.5 billion a year for sleep medications. Their popularity may lie in a mystery that confounds researchers. Many people who take them think they work far better than laboratory measurements show they do.

The analysis said that viewed as a group, the pills reduced the average time to go to sleep 12.8 minutes compared with fake pills, and increased total sleep time 11.4 minutes. The drug makers point to individual studies with better results.

Subjects who took older drugs like Halcion and Restoril fell asleep 10 minutes faster and slept 32 minutes longer than the placebo group. Paradoxically, when subjects were asked how well they slept, they reported better results, 52 extra minutes of sleep with the older drugs and 32 minutes with the newer drugs.

So why are people willing to spend $3.50/ pill on sleep meds when they’re discouraged by $10 co-pays to take other, potentially life-saving medication? In the end, it comes down to being able to take action at the time they want to change something. It might not work well, but at least people are addressing that issue in the moment. This is very similar to being able to address their kids’ cold with a cold remedy (that the FDA may be taking off the counters).

Consumers want to be able to bring to bear a solution whenever they have a problem– it may not have to be 100% effective, but it does allow them to regain control over an issue. As we’ve seen with the rapid adoption of retail clinics vs. the more “effective” but signficantly less convenient office visits, consumers want to be in control and the bar for good enough is something that many in medicine find easy to trip over. As the world begins to revolve around the consumer, professional views on what are good for them may just find themselves a dollar short and confined to the ivory tower…