Healthy Skepticism Library item: 6926

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

Wilkes MS, Bell RA, Kravitz RL.
Direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising: trends, impact, and implications.
Health Aff (Millwood) 2000 Mar-Apr; 19:(2):110-28
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/reprint/19/2/110

Abstract:

We provide an overview of what is known about the impact of direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription drugs. Specifically, we explore the historical trends that led to the industry’s increasing use of this form of promotion. Then, using the published literature to date, we review the impact of DTC advertising on the consumer, the medical
profession, and the health care system. We conclude by offering policy suggestions for how the pharmaceutical industry can promote its products more responsibly, how the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) can regulate DTC advertising more effectively, and how the medical and public health communities can educate the public about drug therapies more
constructively.

Keywords:
*nonsystematic review/United States/DTCA/direct-to-consumer advertising/doctor-patient relationship/quality of prescribing/attitude toward promotion/regulation of promotion/FDA/Food and Drug Administration/broadcast advertisements/print advertisements/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: DOCTOR-PATIENT RELATIONSHIP/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: PRESCRIBING, DRUG USE/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: DIRECT GOVERNMENT REGULATION/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: HEALTH PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: INDUSTRY SELF-REGULATION Advertising/economics Advertising/methods* Advertising/trends* Attitude of Health Personnel Attitude to Health Drug Industry/organization & administration* Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice Humans Marketing of Health Services/organization & administration Mass Media* Organizational Policy Patient Education/methods Physician's Practice Patterns/statistics & numerical data Physician's Practice Patterns/trends Physician's Role Physician-Patient Relations Prescriptions, Drug* United States United States Food and Drug Administration

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