Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3539

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

Cohen EP.
Direct-to-the-public advertisement of prescription drugs.
N Engl J Med 1988 Feb 11; 318:(6):373-6

Abstract:

There is an inherent conflict between a promotional advertisement and the provision of adequate and objective drug information. Advertising seeks to increase sales, not knowledge. Direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs would probably lead to an increase in consumer prices for medications and further overmedication of vulnerable groups such as the elderly. Regulators, legislators and drug-industry officials should be informed of the opposition of the medical profession to DTCA.

Keywords:
*analysis/United States/regulation of promotion/Food and Drug Administration/FDA/direct-to-consumer advertising/prescribing costs/consumer drug prices/quality of prescribing/ATTITUDES REGARDING PROMOTION: HEALTH PROFESSIONALS/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: CONSUMER DRUG COSTS/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: CONSUMERS AND PATIENTS/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: PRESCRIBING, DRUG USE/PROMOTIONAL TECHNIQUES: DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER ADVERTISING/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: DIRECT GOVERNMENT REGULATION Advertising/economics Advertising/legislation & jurisprudence* Cost-Benefit Analysis Economic Competition Health Education Prescriptions, Drug* United States United States Food and Drug Administration

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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