Healthy Skepticism Library item: 6516

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: report

Prescription drugs: little is known about the effects of direct-to-consumer advertising
1994 Jul

Abstract:

Available research does not provide an adequate basis for determining what the effects-or likely effects-of direct-to-consumer advertising may be. Methodologically rigorous and systematic studies have not been conducted in this area. Also, there are no credible studies that permit conclusions to be drawn about the extent to which consumers and physicians support or oppose DTCA, or about the potential for changing attitudes following increased exposure to direct advertising. Nonetheless, rigorous studies of the effects of DTCA and knowledge of both physicians’ and consumers’ views about it are necessary components of regulatory policy in this area.

Keywords:
*systematic review/*government report/United States/direct-to-consumer advertising/DTCA/attitude toward promotion/ consumer behaviour & knowledge/ value of promotion/ATTITUDES REGARDING PROMOTION: CONSUMERS/PATIENTS/ATTITUDES REGARDING PROMOTION: HEALTH PROFESSIONALS/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER ADVERTISING/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: CONSUMERS AND PATIENTS/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: PRESCRIBING, DRUG USE

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts

If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Announcements

PharmedOut’s annual conference: Missing The Target: When Practitioners Harm More Than Heal

No Free Lunch is merging with Healthy Skepticism

Conference program: Pharma Knows Best? Managing Medical Knowledge

Prescrire’s proposals for France’s national conference on medicines policy

Pharmed Out Conference ‘Pharma Knows Best? Managing Medical Knowledge’

More announcements

What's new on this site

Library Home

Library Search

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