Thanks to Kathy A. for pointing me to this opinion piece in BBC news re direct -to-consumer marketing of drugs here in the good old US of A.
America is, I think, the only country in the world which permits
advertising of drugs which are available only through your doctor. The insidious mssage is simple; if your doctor is not offering you this drug, maybe you should be asking for it…Advertising subtly changes that relationship by sending us in to see the doctor filled with nameless dreads about the symptoms of diseases we might have, and a detailed knowledge of the drugs that might help us.
Spot on, old chap!
You can listen to the entire piece here.
As big an issue is marketing procedures direct to patients. “If your doctor is not offering you a lung CT/ brain CT/ angio you should be asking”.
If marketing companies are going to offer the service under the auspice of patient centric care should they also be partially liable when procedures result in complications?
Hello TBTAM,
I love your blog. This is my first time posting, I couldn’t resist.
Are people really that stupid? I really cannot see any other country putting up with this obvious advertising for prescription drugs. If I were a physician i would detest this.
My husband and I make fun of these ada…restless leg syndrome/…try this drug…side effects may include heart attack, stroke (I’m making this up as an example). I think anyone with even a minimum educational level would be repelled by these ads. Do they work? If so, then physicians are not behaving as professionally as they should me. All these drugs have side effects and should only be prescribed when your physician feels they are absolutely necessary.
In closing, I found your blog very educational and agree with you that preimenopause is hell on earth! I hope you are doing OK.
I realize that you are simply quoting the BBC piece, but New Zealand also allows DTC marketing to patients. /nitpick
Have you seen the new Celebrex ads? They’re like 2 minutes long and basically go into every possible reason why Cox-2 inhibitors are really no different in risk profile from any other NSAID, and did you know it was NEVER taken off the market? That commercial drives me crazy! By the end of it, you’ve forgotten what the drug is even for, they spend so much time trying to convince you that the drug is fabulous. Thank goodness they aren’t running the implantable defibrillator ads anymore. These commercials make it seem like every problem you’ve ever had will be fixed by this miracle drug, so if your doctor won’t prescribe it to you then he/she doesn’t want you to have the miracle. Ugh.
Sorry for the rant, love your blog.
What is the crowd’s opinion about when an advert actually gets a person to visit the doctor for the first time in a while to investigate something that he/she heard in that ad?
That scenario is probably not all that common, but very good in that someone who normally ignored medical attention may now get some.
Are the ads insidious? That’s an opinion I don’t always share.
By the way, the pharma ads have to mention side effects of the drug. For some diseases, the effect is worse than the drug side effects – like stroke, heart attack, death…
Ask someone with Barret’s Syndrom if they wish that they had controlled GERD earlier in their lives…
If the world is going to get caught up in the side effects listed in an ad, they should do the research to find out what the chance is of that effect. Likely very low. Pharma companies are NOT PERMITTED to discuss risk levels, but have to list most common effects without context.
Other industries don’t have to list side effects – cars kill lots of people every year. Who is warning you about that? What about alcohol…an adictive substance.
Do some research into the effects of aspirin. It would never get approval in today’s realm, and is very arguably the most effective drug of all time. Can you imagine what the ads would look like if it were a modern regulated drug? It would have a black box warning for internal bleeding and supressing platlets.
and so on…
well… the bottle of wine my husband opened last night does have a warning — that pregnant women risk birth defects in their children if they drink, and that drinking can impair one’s ability to drive a car or operate heavy machinery, or cause health problems. i believe aspirin and similar OTC meds have warnings that people with bleeding problems should not take them. and don’t take too much tylenol, or your liver may fail. and etc.
don’t get me started on the car industry, because those people have a history of putting out products they knew were defective, and just figuring they would lose a certain number of customers per year, but the profit was worth it. they also helped finance all those groovy “tort reform” laws that swept the nation the last couple of decades, on the theory that the problem was that the victims had lawyers — *not* that the survivors and dead people got completely screwed by a defective design that was known and could have been fixed.
if drug ads are actually sending people to doctors and those visits result in higher levels of general, adequate health care — isn’t there a better way to do that? what about insurance coverage for yearly checkups, and encouraging that, making that process easy? what if people felt safe confiding in doctors, not having to worry that something will go in the permanent record that will disqualify them from insurance forever?
this marketing is strictly meant to get patients to go to their doctors for a limited purpose, to get the meds.
it’s true, the purpose of the ad is to sell. Nothing more, nothing less. Just not different than any other ad.
The novel meds don’t have ads…they don’t have competition. They sell themselves. Just like everything else in life.
Check out TBTAMS old post on condom advertising…that one was a real hoot!
🙂
Schrugs
It is scary to think that advertising can have such an impact on medicine.
I have to join Schruggling’s corner. While the ads can go overboard, I have to believe that there is a certain amount of education, or at least awareness now. Unfortunately, healthcare is at a point where YOU have to be your own advocate and like it or not, big pharma is helping you out, even if it helps them out. But isn’t that the point of business?
NZ also allows DTCA. The ads for Xenical (Orlistat) are worth watching…very emotive (thanks to Youtube).
What I find mildly interesting is that NZ allowing DTCA shows that despite the pretty large difference in payment for health services and drugs.