But it turns out that marketing of the drug drove demand. Patients were specifically seeking it from their doctors. This vastly expanded the pool of people exposed to the dangerous side effects of the drug. Pharmaceutical companies are motivated by profit. Stockholders want to make money. And the only reason drug companies engage in DTC marketing is because it helps them achieve that goal.
DTC marketing benefits pharmaceutical stockholders. It drives up the cost of drugs. It pushes the use of drugs in inappropriate cases. And it promotes expensive brand names over perfectly acceptable generics. The Kaiser Family Foundation reported that pharmaceutical costs are the top healthcare concern in the U.
In the end, DTC marketing costs us a lot of money and hurts our health. The best way to decide if a prescription makes sense is to discuss your options with your physician, whose goal is to help you get better. Long story short, the ads aren't doing that much educating of the public.
There is, however, some evidence that the ads improve patient adherence slightly. As for the risks, well, they're there, too. Frosch and colleagues find that -- not surprisingly -- the drug ads lead to an increase in prescribing.
What's more they find that the increase in prescribing includes both appropriate and inappropriate prescriptions. They hesitate, however, to draw any conclusions about whether the increase in inappropriate prescriptions outweighs the increase in appropriate prescriptions. Overall, it seems that direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs is a tricky issue. On the one hand, it has the potential to benefit patients.
On the other hand, it has the potential to harm them -- and to waste precious resources in the process. Striking a balance between these risks and benefits will require deft maneuvering on the part of the FDA, because the pharmaceutical industry has only one concern, and that's selling as many drugs as it can.
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Doctors and patients were more reasonable. As we wrote last year, direct-to-consumer marketing of prescription drugs was approved in the U.
But Lazris sees the trend as a double-edged sword — increasing the risks for harm, on the one hand, but also providing an opportunity to dispel misinformation.
And they end up convincing patients to go on these drugs. So they end up pushing some very dangerous and potentially harmful treatments. Please note , comments are no longer published through this website. All previously made comments are still archived and available for viewing through select posts.
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