Healthy Skepticism Library item: 9042

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

Stange KC.
Time to Ban Direct-to-Consumer Prescription Drug Marketing
Ann Fam Med 2007 Mar-Apr; 5:(2):101-104
http://www.annfammed.org/cgi/content/full/5/2/101

Abstract:

“It is time to ban direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription drugs. The current US system of pharmaceutical company self-monitoring and Food and Drug Administration oversight is not working. Moreover, it cannot realistically be expected to work. A ban is needed to protect the public’s health and the quality of health care.

The research study by Frosch and colleagues in the last issue of Annals1 opened a larger discussion and ties to other evidence that point to this conclusion.2,3 Their research discovered that in actual practice, DTC ads provide biased educational material and emotional appeals that promote drugs over healthy alternatives.1 The online discussion synthesized in the Annals On TRACK feature reveals a complex effect of DTC ads on perceptions, medication prescribing, and adherence.2

Other research has raised concerns about the biases4–6 and public health effects7–9 of DTC advertising. A recent systematic review of the limited evidence found that DTC advertising is associated with patients’ request for specific drugs and increased prescription of advertised drugs without benefits in health outcomes.10 DTC ads have the potential to increase the appropriateness of prescribing among those who have a condition for which medication is underprescribed,11,12 but the (potentially adverse) effect on the many who see the message but who do not have the condition is inherently harder to measure.7,13

Together, these sources show an emerging public health tragedy that is happening so surreptitiously that we are blind to the magnitude of the encroaching effect on the quality of health care and the health of Americans…”

Keywords:
Advertising/direct-to-consumer • drug industry • doctor-patient relationship • public health

Notes:

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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