Dr. Colin Doherty:

I do not have a one-off answer to that question. To take a step back before answering it specifically, the only important thing from my point of view is to make sure we bring the medical profession along with whatever we decide. For the reasons I articulated earlier, and I know from my conversations with Vera Twomey that she would agree, we must have a solid doctor-patient relationship as we move forward on this. If that breaks down, people will be out on their own looking for other doctors, who perhaps do not have the same expertise, and asking them to prescribe a medicine. There are a relatively small number of specialists in this country who can justifiably call themselves experts in these difficult forms of epilepsy. It is a handful of fewer than ten or 12 specialists. These people must be brought along. For good or ill, that is what it means to be in Ireland because it is a relatively small community.

The question of whether they will be satisfied that there will be an interregnum before the publication of the data in a peer-reviewed journal will be an interesting one. My sense of it is that we can still come up with a framework where people balance the severity of some forms of epilepsy - to be blunt about it, the risk of death - versus the wait for that pinnacle of evidence. They are human beings like everybody else. They will say that perhaps we can consider this in a limited way for these most difficult forms until the evidence goes through. If there was support across all the regulatory groups and all the experts agree, my sense of it is, and I will not state it definitively, that we could probably come up with some way of administering or prescribing the drug before the definitive evidence is across the line. It is not an issue of conflict, but there will be strong voices on both sides of that argument. I do not wish to pre-empt the findings.