Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4525

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

Website targets DTC ads.
PMLive.com 2002 Jan 31
http://www.pmlive.com/archive.cfm?&ArticleID=4380&back=-1

Keywords:
DTCA

Full text:

Non-profit organisation Commercial Alert, which campaigns for tighter regulation of commerce, has launched a new website promoting the banning of direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising in the US.

The group says the purpose of the website is to educate the American public “about the dangers of prescription drug advertising, and to mobilize thousands of Americans to voice their opposition to the ads”.

The website (www.stopdrugads.org) encourages visitors to send comments to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in opposition to DTC drug advertising. The FDA held two days of hearings on DTC prescription drug advertising in November 2005 and is accepting public comment on the issue until February 28.

“In effect, drug companies are practising medicine without a licence, and that should be illegal,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert. “We’ve got to halt prescription drug advertising before the next Vioxx tragedy happens.”

On October 27, Commercial Alert released a statement from 211 professors from US medical schools that “direct-to-consumer marketing of prescription drugs should be prohibited.” The statement’s endorsers include medical school professors from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Stanford, Yale, Duke, University of California, San Francisco and other medical schools, along with two former editors-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine.

According to a Harris Poll in November, only 9 per cent of adult respondents believed that the pharmaceutical industry is “generally honest and trustworthy.” Fifty-one per cent believed that the pharmaceutical industry “should be more regulated by the government”.

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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