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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 8199

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

Kauffman-Sherr M, Cutrone-Hoffman D
Physicians-gatekeepers to DTC success
Pharmaceutical Executive 1997 Oct; 17:56-58, 62, 64, 66


Abstract:

An anonymous on-line survey was conducted of 4860 physicians who belong to an Internet service with a private physician membership regarding their views on direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription drugs. The results showed that, in general, physicians were receiving the same or an increasing number of requests for brand name prescription products from their patients. More than 85% of physicians received at least 1 request for a brand name product during the previous month, while 27% received from 5 to 9. Suggestions from relatives and friends were the main reasons for brand name product requests, followed in order by advertisements, prior prescriptions for brand name products, and suggestions from pharmacists and other health professionals. Consumer journals and magazines were the main source of patients’ prescription drug information, followed in order by television, newspapers, and brochures. Most physicians wanted DTC advertising to be decreased or stopped. Sixteen percent of physicians felt that DTC advertising educated patients, 39% indicated it caused patients to reach incorrect conclusions, and 41% felt that DTC both educated and confused patients. Physicians stated that pharmaceutical sales representatives seldom or never mentioned their companies’ DTC advertisements.

 

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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