It occurs to me that often, when I write about the pharmaceutical industry, I have something negative to say. Really, my thoughts are not all negative. It's just that it is easier to come up with criticisms when responding to news items.
Anyway, this one (from Washington Post) deserves comment:
Drug Ads: Taking Medicine Never Looked So Good
Remember all those tricks drugmakers used to get you to take medicine as a kid? They made cough syrup sweet and acetaminophen chewable. They transformed horse pill vitamins into friendly cartoon characters.
Well, perhaps a better approach would've been to inundate you with ads--ones that depict a fearful and alone child who becomes happy, confident and popular after taking a pill.
That formula, it seems, works well on millions of Americans, who watch as many as 16 hours of prescription drug ads every year -- far more than the average time spent with a primary care physician...
That is an interesting point, that the companies get more time to make their case than the doctors do. Other versions of the same story, in other publications are more pointed. For example, this one, from Forbes:
Study Blasts TV Drug Ads
01.29.07, 12:00 AM ET
MONDAY, Jan. 29 (HealthDay News) -- In strong criticism of the pharmaceutical industry's marketing practices, new research claims that televised ads for prescription drugs are riddled with emotional appeals and lack helpful information on the disease itself.
"The ads really use emotion instead of information to promote drugs," said the study's lead author, Dominick Frosch, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles...
...Ninety-five percent of ads made "emotional appeals," and 78 percent implied that use of the medication would result in social approval. Fifty-eight percent of the time, products were depicted as medical breakthroughs.
Other versions appear in USA Today and NewsTarget.com. The study that prompted these articles was published in Annals of Family Medicine 5:6-13 (2007). The full text is here; the accompanying editorial is here. The authors looked at commercials that aired in prime time on ABC, CBS, NBC or Fox in 2004. They analyzed 38 different advertisements. Their biggest beef with the ads is that they rely so heavily on emotional appeals, associating positive imagery with their products. They know that the images are what people will remember, along with the positive association to the products.
I Know from personal experience how effective this is. It is fairly common for patients to mention the images in the ads, even if they don't remember the product name or anything else.
In the editorial, Dr. Stange writes:
While ads present facts and rational arguments, almost all make emotional appeals for their product. The majority of ads portray medication use as socially approved and as a way to regain control over some component of life. Few mention lifestyle approaches as a positive alternative or convey a balance of treatment options...
...Unsaid in the study or editorial is the tremendous intrusion of such advertisements into the clinician-patient relationship. These ads suck precious time, motivation, and energy from the patient visit, forcing clinicians to educate patients about why a slickly promoted drug is not as important as a less sexy lifestyle change or even a cheaper but equally effective alternative medication...
Later on, he points out that the issue is complex:
A recent systematic review concluded that there is good evidence that direct-to-consumer marketing increases demand, but no evidence of benefit.7 Other analyzes of the data in the Epstein study,8,9 however, show a complex relationship between patient demand and quality of care for a single disease. Patient requests for antidepressant medication are associated with more depression-specific history taking, as well as both averting underuse and fostering overuse of antidepressant medication, without apparently distracting from history taking for a second musculoskeletal condition presented during the visit.
That is the most positive thing in the whole article. The editor concludes that the use of direct-to-consumer advertisements is "an unproved public health intervention that raises serious cause for concern."
Of course, the only way to change this would be through administrative rule changes, or by legislation. Hopefully, studies such as these will prompt the government into action. And after the administration and legislature clean up the problems with drug company ads, they should turn the same attention to their own political ads.
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