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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18791

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

Grenard JL, Uy V, Pagán JA, Frosch DL.
Seniors' perceptions of prescription drug advertisements: A pilot study of the potential impact on informed decision making.
Patient Educ Couns 2010 Oct 31;
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TBC-51C9PH0-4&_user=10&_coverDate=11/01/2010&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=0c4ab423cdc68ec259d342a458d0ccf0&searchtype=a


Abstract:

OBJECTIVE: To conduct a pilot study exploring seniors’ perceptions of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs and how the advertisements might prepare them for making informed decisions with their physicians.nnMETHODS: We interviewed 15 seniors (ages 63-82) individually after they each watched nine prescription drug advertisements recorded from broadcast television. Grounded Theory methods were used to identify core themes related to the research questions.nnRESULTS: Four themes emerged from the interviews about DTCA: (1) awareness of medications was increased, (2) information was missing or misleading and drugs were often perceived as more effective than clinical evidence would suggest, (3) most seniors were more strongly influenced by personal or vicarious experience with a drug – and by their physician – than by DTCA, and (4) most seniors were circumspect about the information in commercial DTCA.nnCONCLUSIONS: DTCA may have some limited benefit for informed decision making by seniors, but the advertisements do not provide enough detailed information and some information is misinterpreted.nnPRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: Physicians should be aware that many patients may misunderstand DTCA, and that a certain amount of time may be required during consultations to correct these misconceptions until better advertising methods are employed by the pharmaceutical industry.

 

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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