Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17540

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

Greene JA, Herzberg D.
Hidden in Plain Sight: Marketing Prescription Drugs to Consumers in the Twentieth Century.
Am J Public Health 2010 Mar 18;
http://ajph.aphapublications.org/cgi/reprint/AJPH.2009.181255v1?view=long&pmid=20299640

Abstract:

Although the public health impact of direct-to-consumer (DTC) pharmaceutical advertising remains a subject of great controversy, such promotion is typically understood as a recent phenomenon permitted only by changes in federal regulation of print and broadcast advertising over the past two decades. But today’s omnipresent ads are only the most recent chapter in a longer history of DTC pharmaceutical promotion (including the ghostwriting of popular articles, organization of public relations events, and implicit advertising of products to consumers) stretching back over the twentieth century. We use trade literature and archival materials to examine the continuity of efforts to promote prescription drugs to consumers and to better grapple with the public health significance of contemporary pharmaceutical marketing practices.