Hacker News Reader

Changing the release profile of a drug from once daily to once weekly isn’t a minor thing, and no one is forcing customers to pick the once weekly over the once daily. Now with respect to the original claim, are you saying that once there was a new version of tamsulosin the company issued a statement claiming the old version was unsafe? Do you have a reference for that?

View on HN

1. The consumers aren’t really choosing, their prescribers are, with a lot of friction required to change against their initial decision.

2. While they still had the patent on the regular tamsulosin formulation, they stopped making it. Effectively forcing everyone onto the XR formulation unless they wanted to change molecules entirely.

The data showed little difference as I recall in terms of effectiveness because the half life was long enough to take once daily, regardless of formulation.

Re: "no one is forcing customers to pick the once weekly over the once daily"-

Who's the customer here, the prescriber or the patient? Is a prescription for the weekly formulation valid for the daily one too?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com