Drug ads encourage unnecessary prescriptions for depression, study says

Critics of Paxil and other anti-depression drugs say that commercials encourage people suffering from depression to turn to medication, rather than seeking treatment. The United States is one of few industrialized nations that allows drug companies to advertise on television, and many physicians are skeptical of such marketing techniques.

• An April 27 article about a study of direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs referred to a 2001 Food and Drug Administration warning letter sent to Merck & Co. regarding misleading promotion of its arthritis drug Vioxx.
• The letter concerned promotional audio conferences given on behalf of Merck, a company news release and comments by sales representatives, but not to direct-to-consumer advertising.
• Actors pretending to be patients with symptoms of stress and fatigue were five times as likely to walk out of doctors' offices with a prescription when they mentioned seeing an ad for the heavily promoted antidepressant Paxil, according an unusual study being published today.
• The study employed an elaborate ruse -- sending actors with fake symptoms into 152 doctors' offices to see whether they would get prescriptions.
• Most who did not report symptoms of depression were not given medications, but when they asked for Paxil, 55 percent were given prescriptions, and 50 percent received diagnoses of depression.
• Many public health advocates have long complained about ads showing happy people whose lives were changed by a drug, and now voices in Congress, the Food and Drug Administration and even the pharmaceutical industry are asking whether things have gone too far.
• "It is a haphazard approach to health promotion that is driven primarily by the pharmaceutical industry's interest in turning a profit," said Matthew F. Hollon, an internist at the University of Washington in Seattle, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.
• Hollon and the researchers who conducted the study said it was not realistic to expect such marketing to be abolished, given the climate of deregulation in Washington.
• The researchers sent actors with hidden tape recorders into general physicians' offices in three cities between May 2003 and May 2004.