You have to take everything you read in SEEKING ALPHA, the authors may try to be objective but they are investors, not medical experts, and they are often amatures, otherwise the wouldn't be writing for seeking alpha where basically you just need a pulse to get your report accepted. well, a pulse and a computer.
i saw one major possible mistake, saying the patients had to take brand name COMTAN, i kind of doubt any company would stipulate you have to take a brand name, maybe i'm wrong. plus duodopa patients take oral l-dopa.

he's complaining about no placebo? pretty tough to incorporate a placebo, are you going to cut off medication to pd'ers? i don't think so. did they do a crossover, where there were 2 groups, one getting stalevo, the other getting neuroderm, then switch them after a month?

hard to believe any patient would prefer being operated on to get the duodopa vs an external pump. the author needed to look at quality of life outcomes, not whether a patient had to take oral l-dopa and entacapone. plus, the C/L gel used in the pump is incredibly expensive, if they can use less by adding oral entacapone it might make their product more attractive to insurance companies and of course patients.


if you want to judge the neuroderm product look at the original documents by them, try to find out what other analysts have written and look at other reports by this author, even google him/her and see what others think about his objectivity.

you've also got this weird situation where he is arguing against the purchase of neuroderm by a japanese company so you know from the outset he's probably not going to be 100% objective. they were bought out.