Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18019
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
Kravitz RL
Direct-to-Consumer Advertising of Prescription Drugs: Implications for the Patient-Physician Relationship
JAMA 2000 Nov 1; 284:(17):2244
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/284/17/2244
Abstract:
Anyone who switches on a television or reads a newspaper cannot help but notice the dramatic upsurge in the number of prescription drug advertisements. The benefits and costs of this practice have been intensely debated.1-2 A major concern is the effect of DTC advertising on the patient-physician relationship.
One factor contributing to the rise of DTC advertising is the erosion of physicians’ authority to prescribe specific drugs. Recent years have seen the proliferation of drug formularies, utilization review systems, and pharmaceutical risk-sharing agreements. As a result, it is more difficult for pharmaceutical companies to transform the goodwill generated from company-sponsored “educational” dinners into actual prescriptions.
Critics of DTC advertising argue that pharmaceutical companies have simply found a new way to push physicians-in the face of resistance from group medical directors and chairs of formulary committees to prescribe the brand name drug over the generic, the new drug over the old, and the profitable drug over the unprofitable. And who better to provide the pushing than the patient, now an enlightened “health care consumer” armed with information from DTC ads?2
Studies suggest that while patients are in favor of these ads, their physicians are not. A survey conducted in the early 1990s, for example, found that consumers were open to the idea of using DTC ads as a source of information about drugs to supplement advice from physicians.3 A 1997 study of US family physicians, however, found that four fifths believed that DTC advertising was “not a good idea” because they increase costs and promote “misleading, biased views” of drugs.4…
