Betty,
I have thought a lot about what the script numbers mean. I reproduce
below part of a message I posted a long time ago. We need to know
precisely what a "refill" means and also how frequently people have
sex. Note that the viagra refills have also levelled now even though
there are many "news" each week. I do think that recruitment for muse
is not as high as it ought to be given appropriate instruction and
promotion - but it could be higher than we think if people don't have
sex very often. Vivus boasted in one of their recent press releases
that 600,000 men had try muse - in this light the apparently low
refills might seem frightening, but not necessarily.
DaiS
*******
..........
I have made some progress with the other question, how many men who
try muse stick to it. I built a model of the script data. Please tell
me if you think the assumptions of this model are wrong.
I took all the data since muse was introduced and trimmed off the
viagra period and the few early weeks of muse to give a 52 week
period.
Total: news=653177 repeats=199503
Now check, I assumed that every man who tried muse would take up 1 new
script. If he decided to continue he would then get another
prescription from his doctor in which the first script written down on
the piece of paper would be treated by the pharmacist as a new and K
others written down would be repeats. When this was finished he would
return to his doc for another and so on. I assumed that the first
script for each man would be a six pack, and that each man recruited
as a regular user would use P packs per year. Thus P=2 would be sex
once a month, P=10 sex a little more often than once a week. I can
change the model if I'm wrong.
I used the model to predict the % of men who try muse that are
recruited as regular users, given P, K, and the above totals. N is
number of men trying muse, predicted by model. These are the results.
Tabulated is % recruitment
P=2 P=5 P=10 P=20 N
K=1 88 22 10 5 454,000
K=2 54 14 6 3 553,000
K=3 45 11 5 2 587,000
The results tell me that those who claim that not many men are being
recruited could be wrong, the value for % recruitment is very
sensitive to the parameters of the model. It could be much greater
than 10%, if men have sex between once a week and once a month.
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