Was the show "House, MD" correlated with vicodin use? If so, which way did the causation go?

Eugen G Tarnow  May 13 2015 10:03:37 AM

By Eugen Tarnow, Ph.D.
Avalon Business Systems, Inc.
http://AvalonAnalytics.com

A very famous social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, once tried to find out whether violence on TV translates into violence in society.  His findings were that the crime rate did not go up after a crime was shown on TV, BUT that the type of crime tended to imitate the TV show.

When you do predictive analytics, all kinds of ideas enter your mind when you sit and clean client data.

Recently it was found that the number one drug for Medicare patients is vicodin, the drug that gets Dr. House hooked on TV.  The question I ask myself is - did the TV show influence the number of prescriptions of vicodin?  If so, in which direction?

We don't have the resources to do this project, but someone ought to do it.  Help has been offered on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSaasBjeJek

One would need to get the daily prescription data from IMS and then the show data (from Nielsen?).  Entirely doable and fascinating project!

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