Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14574

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

Hall DV, Jones SC.
Australian consumer responses to DTCA and other pharmaceutical company sponsored advertisements.
Aust N Z J Public Health 2008 Oct; 32:(5):471-8
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18959553

Abstract:

Objective: This study aimed to elicit and compare the responses of Australian consumers towards New Zealand (NZ) direct-to-consumer-advertisements (DTCA) for prescription medicines and matched pharmaceutical company-sponsored advertisements from Australia. Methods: A survey questionnaire was mailed to a random sample of residents in a metropolitan area in NSW. Potential participants were randomised to receive one of four different advertisements: two for weight loss and two for Alzheimer’s disease. A total of 413 responses were received and analysed. Results: Participants reported that they were not likely to ask for a prescription from their doctor as a result of seeing any of the advertisements in the study. The Australian disease awareness advertisement that did not refer to a medicinal treatment was perceived as more valuable than the NZ DTCA or other Australian advertisement. Overall, participants found it easier to make sense of the more informational advertisements, and felt that there was insufficient information regarding the disease/condition and treatments in the more emotive and transformational advertisements. Conclusions: While there is concern over potential negative effects of pharmaceutical-sponsored disease awareness advertisements, this study found that Australian consumers perceived an informational advertisement with a list of disease symptoms to be valuable. Implications: These findings contribute to debate in New Zealand and Australia regarding DTCA and disease awareness advertising, and have the potential to inform guidelines relevant to the advertising of prescription medicine in each country.

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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