Page 63 - The McKinsey Mind

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Designing the Analysis 41

really an accepted disease. It’s been defined by psychiatrists
but is very rarely diagnosed; GPs have probably never even
heard of it. From a pharmaceutical point of view, it opens up
the opportunity for some sort of female Viagra. At this point,
there’s no information on it.

Undaunted by this difficult scenario, Paul looked for analogous
situations that might shed light on his problem:

We’ve tried to draw some parallels with Viagra for men as an
obvious link. Mainly, however, we’re looking for analogies
both with other sexual disorders and with what one might
call lifestyle issues—obesity, say, or other diseases. We may
be able to use these analogies to justify the business case.

Once Paul found some useful analogies, he looked for insights
from them:

One of the links we’re hypothesizing is resistance—reluc-
tance among patients to admit they have this condition.
How many patients are actually going to talk to their doc-
tor about it? At the moment, none of them do, so you can’t
use their history as an example. Of course, pre-Viagra, far
fewer men talked to their doctor about ED [erectile dysfunc-
tion]. Whether women have the same attitude as men
toward this remains an open question. On the mental side
we’re looking at obesity—patients have cravings, or they eat
because it is a habit, or they think they want to, so that’s
more of a mental phenomenon—and the extent to which
people admit they have obesity as a mental disease. There are
all sorts of analogies that we’re using to triangulate what sort
of numbers we might be looking at. Even if, at the end of
the day, we’ll never know precisely, we hope to be able to
come up with something in the ballpark.