Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1235

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Calfee JE.
What do we know about direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs?
Health Aff (Millwood) 2003 Jan-Jun; Suppl:
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/reprint/hlthaff.w3.116v1

Abstract:

Two papers, by Joel Weissman and colleagues and by Robert Dubois, add to our limited knowledge of the effects of direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription drugs. Their results reinforce the largely positive findings from consumer surveys, while adding valuable new data and insights. These suggest that DTC ads probably improve patients’ health outcomes and do not tend to lead to inappropriate prescribing. DTC advertising is emerging as a positive force in health care markets, consistent with what is known about the effects of advertising in many other markets.

Keywords:
Advertising* Drug Industry* Drug Utilization Evaluation Studies Health Care Surveys Humans Patient Participation* Physician's Practice Patterns Physician-Patient Relations United States

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909