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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13290

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

Lexchin J, Mintzes B.
Direct-to-Consumer Advertising of Prescription Drugs: The Evidence Says No
Journal of Public Policy and Marketing 2002; 21:(2):194-201
http://web.archive.org/web/20080511145449/http://www.marketingpower.com/content18627.php


Abstract:

A small subset of drugs is advertised to the U.S. public: mainly new, expensive drugs for long-term use by wide target audiences. Most new drugs offer little if any therapeutic advantage over existing products. There is little rationale, from a public health perspective, for bringing this specific subset of products to consumers’ attention or establishing an emotional connection through advertising imagery and branding. DTC advertisements frequently downplay safety information as well as give consumers little, if any, educational information. Recent work suggests that physicians prescribe most advertised drugs requested by patients, often despite ambivalence about treatment choice. Studies assessing the influence of promotional information on prescribing decisions indicate a strong and consistent association between greater reliance on promotion and poorer quality prescribing. After more than 20 years of DTC advertising there is still no evidence that it results in any improvement in health outcomes. In the face of these findings, any move to relax existing regulations around DTC advertising must be resisted.

 

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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