Oracea just expensive doxycycline?

I just saw a commercial for a product called Oracea.  Oracia is "a low-dose form of doxycycline" for the treatment of a skin condition known as rosacea.

Doxycycline ought to cost no more than $10 a month, but Oracea costs $200.    I did some checking on the Internet, and Oracea may be the poster-child for health-care costs run amok (h/t rosacea support):

KUNC: The Big Zit Rip-off, Marc Ringel
GREELEY, CO (2009-05-18) Most agree that something needs to be done to overhaul America’s healthcare system. But leave it to KUNC commentator Dr. Marc Ringel to illustrate the problem – through something as small and innocuous as a pimple.
Or you can buy Oracea, a brand-name doxycycline marketed by Galderma Laboratories. Oracea will set you back over $200 a month if you purchase it in this country or about $150 if you shop online and make your buy from a Canadian outfit. To be sure, the dosage of Oracea is 40mg, making it, like the baby bear’s porridge, just right.
…
I cannot imagine, though, how the extra 10 mg in a 50 mg generic doxycycline capsule could cause close to the distress that too-hot or too-cold porridge did to Goldilocks. Nor do I see how Oracea would work better than the plain vanilla generic except, perhaps, for an enhanced placebo effect generated by spending so much money on a product marketed especially to this affliction. A person might figure that such an exorbitantly expensive brand name would just have to work better.

Oracea is claimed to have this advantage over doxycycline:

Oracea is able to maintain a sustained release of the active ingredient doxycycline without venturing into anti-microbial territory. The advantage of a delayed release product is that Oracea can offer the `area under the concentration-by-time curve’ delivery, but at sub-antimicrobial dosage over 24 hours.

That is, Oracea can deliver a dosage of doxycycline that can give measurable results, but keep the concentration of doxycycline in your blood low enough to reduce potential problems associated with antibiotics.

If you are interested in researching this question further, the Rosacea support group website looks like a good place to start.

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Are antidepressants over-prescibed?

"Popular antidepressants including Prozac and Paxil have little impact on most patients, according to a comprehensive review of newly released data from trials that were conducted before the drugs were approved in the U.S." reports Time Magazine. Money quote:

The researchers' paper, published this week in the journal PLoS Medicine, claims that only patients who are diagnosed "at the upper end of the very severely depressed category" get any meaningful benefit from the widely prescribed drugs. For the others, the paper says, antidepressants are barely more effective than a placebo (although patients suffering from depression, like those suffering from chronic pain, generally do see a substantial placebo benefit).

Other studies have shown that psychotherapy in combination with medication produces the best results. According to one study, "In chronic major depression, combined treatment has demonstrated significant superiority over medication or psychotherapy alone."

The US population is hugely over medicated and anti-depressants are just one of the medicines that have been over-prescribed. The long-term effects of these and many other medicines are generally unknown. Vigorous daily exercise, dietary changes, and cognitive therapy are promising alternatives to medication that patients with depression should examine.

So far, 2008 has brought mostly bad news for America's pharmaceutical industry; in weeks previous, major studies have called into question the effectiveness of the drug companies' lucrative lucrative cholesterol lowering drugs and diabetes drugs were called into question.

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