Capitol Hill Blue Forums Science and Technology Health, Medicine & the healing Sciences Pharmaceutical Advertising

Here's an interesting article from Dr. Andrew Weil. Now I take certain medications that I have to have. But the pervasiveness of drug advertising is ridiculous. What do you think?

Should you get your drug information from a famous actor?

I'm on the fence about Dr. Weil; sometimes he makes sense to me, sometimes he doesn't. He's sold me a book or two, though.

As for pharmaceutical advertising - I really don't like it. I think it should be limited even more strictly than tobacco and alcohol.

It's disturbing in a couple of different ways.

- It's suggesting that "civilians" have access to more recent pharmaceutical information than their physicians do (it may or may not be true; it's disturbing.)
- It's a weird parallel to advertising to small children: "Mommy, buy me this!" "Doc, prescribe me this!"

On the other hand, if your physician is a little too wedded to one particular pharm company (or sales rep), it does make some sense for the patient to know about alternatives. Still, I would prefer that knowledge of alternatives to come from something other than advertising, that bastion of truth and accuracy.

I'd also like to see as much of that 24% of sales revenue moved from promotion to R&D.

I agree, Julia. I'm lukewarm about Dr. Weil as well, but this is a good discussion starter, I think.

I swear that my primary doctor prescribes based on whoever the last rep was in his office. Everything he has ever prescribed for me is "new."

Most of Weil's complaint is valid, but I can easily think of two counter-examples where:

1) The patient is unlikely to mention the problem if he isn't aware that there is a highly-successful drug therapy. This example would be erectile dysfunction. Before Viagra, Cialis, etc. all the medical treatments for ED were so horrible that most sufferers would rather just do without. Before the ads, I think a lot of men would also have been ashamed to mention such a problem to their doctors. Now they can see they have plenty of company and seek treatment.

2) The patient might already be on one drug, but not be aware that switching to another equally-effective drug would offer some feature they would highly value. This example would be the new birth control pills that women can take continuously for months without a one week break every month. That "period" each month really has no clinical benefit and was included just to give the illusion of a normal menstrual cycle to "reassure the patient".

PIA, I would love to agree with you except...again, we are relying on advertising to educate, and I think that's a dangerous road.

There could be monthly or quarterly "Drug information Reports", paid for by all the drug companies and supervised by the government. The report would feature news about new or improved drugs with their indications, use and warnings all in a non-dramatized format.

Maybe report on two drugs per segment, have as many segments going as needed, and all paid for by all drug companies in a fund based upon their sales.

You can find a support group for almost all medications and conditions. Some of these have been helpful for me to learn more about a drug. However, some of them are just vehicles for people to expound about every aspect of their health history. Just today, I saw a forum post in which a man was saying that his psoriatic arthritis was caused by the fact that he was not circumcised.

However, these can be a good route to finding a variety of information.