Coming Up Next: How do Doctors Talk about the Drug Pipeline?
When we talk about the drug pipeline, we’re talking about the future.
Pipeline drugs are often the newest medical advancements that scientists are still in the process of testing for safety or efficacy. As doctors can’t generally prescribe pipeline drugs, I wasn’t expecting them to come up very often in in-office dialogues. But as I’ve found listening in to Verilogue’s medical conversation database, doctors are still talking about these upcoming treatments with patients, and they have a lot of different reasons for doing so.
Verilogue’s database currently has about 200 recorded in-office visits that feature discussion of the drug “pipeline.” Remember that last month we found that over 400 in-office conversations included the word “zombie,” which might lead us to believe that pipeline talk is less frequent than, say, patients talking about how they feel like characters from The Walking Dead. But it’s also important to note that discussions of new treatments arise with a lot more lexical variety than just the word ‘pipeline.’
