Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14926

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: news

Staton T.
Suddenly, everyone's a DTC critic
Fierce Pharma 2009 Jan 13
http://www.fiercepharma.com/story/suddenly-everyones-dtc-critic/2009-01-13

Full text:

Ding dong, DTC is all but dead? The Pharma Marketing Blog totes up some recent quotes and numbers, concluding that 2009 could be the year consumer advertising will falter in a big way.

Evidence? Roche pharmaceuticals chief William Burns recently called DTC advertising the “worst decision for the industry.” At the same conference, Shire CEO Angus Russell said the U.S. is way too lax in regulating direct communication with patients. Now, GlaxoSmithKline is backing off (at least somewhat) from its own TV advertising. CEO Andrew Witty even says TV ads sometimes alienate the patients they’re trying to reach.

Plus, PMB notes, there’s Dr. Sidney Wolfe—the consumer advocate who’s now a big cheese on the FDA’s Drug Safety and Risk Management Committee. Wolfe is an outspoken proponent of limiting consumer ads.

And then there’s a new study, reported today by MSNBC, which found that DTC ads aren’t as effective as they used to be. Only 3.5 percent of patient visits to the doctors’ offices and clinics studied included a request for a specific drug. That’s about half the rate found in a 2003 study. And when researchers looked specifically at drugs that had been advertised recently, the rate was even lower, at 2.6 percent. (A caveat: this study looked at low-income patients, who might not be representative of the entire drug-taking population.)

Experts theorize that patients might be dismissive of drug ads these days. High profile safety problems may be making TV-watchers more skeptical about the claims they see in DTC ads. Not good news for the companies that spend millions on those ads. Maybe that’s the real reason why pharma execs are suddenly turned off.

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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