Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 It is this direct-to-consumer advertising, in fact, that is largely responsible for the over-medication of people with dangerous drugs such as Vioxx. This direct-to-consumer advertising continues today, and it is adding to the problem by creating an over-medicated nation where patients think they have to make a list of advertised drugs, then go to their doctor and request them by name. |
| The first is direct-to-consumer advertising. The second is the funding of the FDA. And the third is the drug side effects reporting system. These three fundamental problems need to be addressed immediately if we are to live in a nation where we aren't killing our citizens with our own products that are actually safety approved by the government itself.
To put all this into perspective, keep in mind that prescription drugs have killed far more Americans, in fact thousands of times more Americans, than all terrorists combined. |
| The most obvious of these is the legalization of direct-to-consumer advertising by drug companies. This decision was made in 1997 and it allowed drug companies to place ads on television, in magazines, newspapers, billboards and other media with the purported goal of "educating" consumers about prescription drugs. And yet the very premise is laughable. No reasonable person could possibly believe that drug companies should advertising prescription drugs to patients who don't have medical qualifications to even understand if they should use those drugs in the first place. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 In 199 c, the pharmaceutical industry spent a mere $595 million on direct-to-consumer advertising, virtually all of it on newspaper and magazine ads. By 1998, that figure had jumped to $1.17 billion. It doubled again, to $2.38 billion, by 2001, with more than 70 percent of the spending going toward television spots. By 200c, drug companies were spending $3 billion a year on ads aimed at consumers, and company executives had finally come around to their marketers' way of thinking: Consumer ads weren't vulgar; they didn't interfere with the doctor-patient relationship. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 It was an easy sell: Most consumers already demonstrate a cult-like belief in pharmaceutical medicine thanks to a barrage of direct-to-consumer advertising funded by deep-pocketed drug companies, and it was only a minor shift to get them to believe animals need synthetic chemicals in their bodies, too.
So today, the majority of veterinarians in the United States now practice chemical-based medicine on pets. At the first sign of any health symptom, they slap the animal with a prescription for expensive, patented pharmaceuticals. |
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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 But there have been few, if any, large studies that rigorously investigate whether direct-to-consumer advertising causes unnecessary medical labeling or leads to inappropriate or harmful prescription of drugs. What is crystal clear, however, is that these ads boost drug sales.
Industry executives argue that the most powerful case for direct-to-consumer advertising is evidence of underdiagnosis and undertreatment among those people with serious health problems, including high cholesterol, high blood pressure, depression and, presumably, PMDD. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The great Congressional sellout
Congress had the potential to pass a really good law here -- one that would have ended direct-to-consumer advertising, banned conflicts of interest at the FDA, required the open source publication of drug trials and ended the U.S. monopoly on pharmaceuticals. Instead, Congress chose to do none of these things. It staged a song and dance about "FDA reform" while selling out the future of America's health to a tiny but powerful group of ultra-wealthy corporations that now virtually rule this country. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
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| Further corporate assistance came in the form of direct-to-consumer advertising that was at the least deceitful, if not outright fraudulent. Human insulin (rDNA) was allowed to be described as "just like that made by the human body" — a half-truth at best. It was promoted as "better" than other insulins currently available. Again, this was a lie based on economics and on lack of unbiased research at reputable universities/medical centers. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| Once the FDA opened the door in 1997 to less-regulated direct-to-consumer advertising, says Elliott, "companies began hitting for the fences." They concentrated their efforts on potential blockbuster drugs for chronic illnesses that could be taken by millions of patients. A new antibiotic might save lives, but a new lifestyle drug—Prozac for depression, Clar-itin for allergies, or a drug like Lipitor that treats a risk factor like high cholesterol—could be taken every day by huge populations, sometimes for years on end. |
| No pushback
For more than a decade, the drug industry has successfully used direct-to-consumer advertising to boost sales of brand-name drugs, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that the device industry has finally caught on to this marketing tool. After all, it's their job to sell as many of their machines as they can, and stimulating patient demand for imaging tests is one way to do that. What is surprising is the blinding speed at which many new, medical technologies, not just imaging equipment, are adopted by hospitals and physicians, regardless of their true utility or costs. |
| Generation Rx
Some doctors argue that direct-to-consumer advertising has benefited their patients, that it has helped bring the sick into their offices, where they can receive needed medical care. But for many other physicians, drug advertising has changed their relationship with patients for the worse, often in precisely the ways predicted by the pharmaceutical executives who were writing to Congress back in the 1980s. Patients now routinely diagnose themselves with conditions and come to their doctors demanding the brand-name drugs they see advertised. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
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| When Congress approved direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceutical products, they subverted the time-proven doctor-patient relationship. With prescription pad in hand, and patients programmed by Madison Avenue ad executives, today's medical professionals are little more than middlemen, functioning as go-betweens for the pharmaceuticals. Since the role of the medical professional is instrumental in increasing corporate wealth, the pharmaceutical corporations amply reward these middlemen. The initials "M.D." may stand for "medical doctor. |
Craig Pepin-Donat
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 In October 2002, at the request of members of Congress, the agency submitted a report called "Prescription Drugs, FDA Oversight of direct-to-consumer advertising Has Limitations." The report confirmed that drugs with high DTC spending were among the best-selling drugs.
In 2000, 22 of the 50 drugs with the highest advertising spending were among the top 50 in sales, and sales of drugs with the highest DTC spending rose more quickly than sales of other drugs. |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
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 Had the company not valued sales over safety, a suitable trial could have been initiated rapidly at a fraction of the cost of Merck's direct-to-consumer advertising campaign.45
Writing from the "editorial desk" (which clearly gives the writer more authority than a "letter to the editor") of the New York Times, Topol estimated that COX-2 inhibitors were responsible for tens of thousands of heart attacks or strokes per annum. "Good riddance to a bad drug," he concluded, calling the entire story of COX-2 inhibitors "a debacle."46
That should have been the end of the story. Not so. |
Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George
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 Despite the barrage of direct-to-consumer advertising you are exposed to that seems to suggest drug companies are producing a steady stream of innovative medicines, the success of the industry's research and development efforts has been slowing down just as genomics and a variety of other approaches have come along with the promise of improving the efficiency of drug development. |
J. Douglas Bremner
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 Other pressures are also behind the increase in antidepressant prescriptions. direct-to-consumer advertising in the U.S. is also driving up antidepressant usage. Interestingly, by making consumers more likely to talk to their doctors about going on a medication, when patients ask for an antidepressant, they get it 76% of the time compared to patients with the same symptoms who don't ask to go on antidepressants, who are given antidepressant prescriptions only 31 % of the time.
Antidepressants are approved by the FDA for the treatment of several disorders in addition to depression. |
| The serotonin hypothesis of depression has been overplayed in the direct-to-consumer advertising as a way to link the "one pill to one chemical imbalance" idea. There never was much evidence that a deficiency of serotonin underlay depression, or that this deficiency could be fixed with a medication that boosts serotonin. If that were the case, then why don't you get better right away with an antidepressant, since it boosts serotonin right away? The academic psychiatry community never believed this hypothesis, although it never said much about it. |
Melody Petersen
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 Of course there are overreaching business practices that some pharmaceutical companies sometimes utilize, such as selling too hard, charging too much, or taking advantage of consumer ignorance with overstated direct-to-consumer advertising," wrote Howard Solomon, the chairman of Forest Laboratories, in a letter to shareholders in 2002. "And, of course, it is appropriate to criticize, and in a proper case, to take action against such excesses but, at the same time, to realize that all businesses have comparable excesses. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| A series of suits, culminating in a case heard before the Supreme Court in 1996, finally convinced the FDA that if pharmaceutical companies ever challenged its restrictions on direct-to-consumer advertising, the agency might well lose the case. In 1997, it issued a draft rule, finalized two years later, permitting companies to boil down the brief summary to a few seconds for broadcast advertisements, thus opening the gates to Zoloft cartoon ads during prime-time sitcoms and Ambien ads on the nightly news. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 What we are witnessing today is the beginning of the end of an era: the days of the Big Pharma con in which direct-to-consumer advertising pushed a drug industry to unprecedented levels of corporate greed. Of course, Eli Lilly denies everything. It's the same story talking to Merck. All these companies claim to be actually protecting the public health and working for the common good. Yet they continue to sell drugs with questionable safety records that are only now coming to light. And in none of these cases did these companies produce these documents on their own. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 A sane, ethical FDA would have not only banned COX-2 inhibitors outright, it would have put an end to direct-to-consumer advertising that ultimately led to the over-hyping and over-prescribing of these painkillers in the first place. Most people taking COX-2 inhibitors don't even need them. They would be better off with simple over-the-counter painkillers or, better yet, natural health treatments like nutrition, herbal remedies and supplements that work far better than prescription drugs for stopping arthritis pain (and without all the negative side effects). |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Of course, thanks to direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs, Big Pharma practically owns the mainstream media these days. Stories that discredit vitamins and recommend expensive prescription drugs are met with the big "thumbs up" from influential advertisers like drug companies. That must be why journalists around the world leaped on this story and started parroting distorted conclusion (throw away your calcium supplements!) without actually bothering to read the study. |
Marcia Angell, M.D.
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 Drug companies sometimes contend that direct-to-consumer advertising is also educational, but it is even less educational than company-sponsored meetings for doctors in Hawaii. There is no way consumers can evaluate clinical claims in a thirty-second TV advertisement. The purpose and the effect of these commercials is to increase pressure on doctors to prescribe the latest, most expensive me-too drugs. direct-to-consumer advertising should be prohibited in the United States just as it is in other advanced countries. At the very least, it should be regulated more stringently. |
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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| Drummond Rennie, disagrees. "Direct-to-consumer advertising has got nothing to do with the public's education and it has got absolutely everything to do with ... boosting product sales."21
The recent history of the controversial young disorder
PMDD also has a lot to do with boosting product sales—in this case antidepressants. Taking a closer look at that history offers some fascinating insights into how a new condition is brought into the world, and the various players who nurture it in the years leading up to its debut on the world stage in highly produced TV advertisements. |
| One of the key ways of making healthy people believe they are sick is direct-to-consumer advertising of drugs and diseases—and there is now more than $3 billion dollars' worth of it every year in the U.S. alone; more or less $10 million a day. One recent TV advertisement on high rotation in the U.S. featured stunning footage of a middle-aged female surfer riding perfectly formed waves. The mellow mood, though, is broken when the surfer runs in to the beach, and accidentally knocks over a row of surfboards that had been planted neatly in the sand. |
| Industry executives argue that the most powerful case for direct-to-consumer advertising is evidence of underdiagnosis and undertreatment among those people with serious health problems, including high cholesterol, high blood pressure, depression and, presumably, PMDD.18 In a special issue of the British Medical Journal devoted to the topic of medicalization, and titled "Too Much Medicine?," two senior officials from the drug company Merck wrote that the rules governing drug advertising should be loosened in Europe to help fix the urgent problem of undertreatment. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 But common sense has not prevailed: the industry pressured the FDA to legalize direct-to-consumer advertising in 1998, and since that time drug ads have polluted the airways and the world of print publications, and prescriptions for those advertised drugs have risen considerably as a direct result of the advertising.
The drug companies know this: Advertising works. Thus, they continue to run those ads and they continue to focus on the promotion of pharmaceuticals for profit rather than education about chemical agents that should be used with caution, and only in specific circumstances. |
Greg Critser
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 A friend of Davis's, William Castagnoli, had been chafing for years to try out direct-to-consumer advertising, but had made little headway. Castagnoli had made his bones at the old Frohlich Pharmaceutical Advertising Agency, which, under its founder, Arthur Frohlich, became a veritable monopoly for medical journal advertising. In the mid-1980s, at Medicus, the successor agency after Frohlich died, Castagnoli served as a senior executive overlooking the Merrill-Dow account. He had tried to get his superiors interested in DTC for prescription drugs. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 That is, of course, another similarity between Big Tobacco and Big Pharma: they both use direct-to-consumer advertising to create demand for their products. For many years, tobacco companies sponsored sporting events; in fact, they still attempt to sponsor many sporting events. In the pharmaceutical industry, we see heavy magazine and television advertising, and hundreds of millions of dollars spent lobbying doctors, buying them gifts, trips (to Hawaii, believe it or not), air tickets, and stays in luxurious resorts. |
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