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Quotes about Dtc Ads from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"Between 1991 and 2003, spending on dtc ads in the United States increased 58-fold, reaching $3.2 billion per year. During the same years, drug industry profit margins have skyrocketed from about 12 percent of revenues (net of all research and development expenses) in 1991 to 18 percent of revenues in 2001, while the rest of the Fortune 500 industries averaged 5 percent or less. UNDER THE RADAR SCREEN: PUBLIC RELATIONS Even more insidious than misleading advertising is the subtle influence of public relations campaigns." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.)

"GlaxoSmithKline cranked up an aggressive public relations campaign—an amalgam of profiles of generalized anxiety sufferers given out to local news programs, patient surveys meant to inform the populace of the hidden epidemic, expert testimony by eminent psychiatrists, a blizzard of newspaper articles, and, most pointedly, an onslaught of dtc ads on television." As part of an earlier campaign for "social anxiety disorder" ("Imagine Being Allergic to People" was the slogan), GlaxoSmithKline spent $92 million in one year to market Paxil—more than Nike spent to market its top shoes." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"One might imagine new dtc ads heralding the huge amount of untreated mental disorders unearthed by the NCS-R and suggesting that if you have this "symptom," you should ask your doctor if (insert specific SSRI) is right for you. This scenario then becomes a medicalization-amplifying feedback loop. CHAPTER SEVEN The Shifting Engines of Medicalization When I first began studying medicalization in the 1970s the most important forces behind medicalization were physicians, social movements and interest groups, and various organizational or interprofessional activities." - Peter Conrad, The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders (Get the book.)

"Yet the dtc ads, now a regular part of television viewing, account for only 15% of total drug promotion spending. Total promotional spending in 2001 amounted to over $19 billion,14 an amount greater than the total gross domestic product of all but approximately 69 of the world's nations. Over 100 of the world's nations including Costa Rica, Panama, Uraguay, Bolivia, Honduras and most of the other Latin American countries have GDPs far below this amount.15 And where did the drug companies spend most of that vast sum? By a wide margin the largest amount was spent on antidepressant promotion." - Dr. Timothy Scott, America Fooled: The Truth About Antidepressants, Antipsychotics and How We've Been Deceived (Get the book.)

"Lastly, to ensure that Dan Troy, the Federalist Society, and law firms for the broadcast industry have something to litigate against for the next few years, the FDA should request a voluntary hold on dtc ads for every new drug it approves; under this guidance, DTC — including disease awareness — for any new drug product should wait two years before commencing the usual ask-your-doctor-now campaign. The money pharma would save would allow it to reduce prices, do better clinical studies, and fund more meaningful research. As we enter what the D.C." - Greg Critser, Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Get the book.) "But if you do two hundred fifty days of dtc ads, you get sixty-five percent!" It could be a lot better, he said, if HMOs were not so chintzy in their reimbursement departments, constantly making bigger and bigger demands on everyone to justify long drug regimens. That's why increasingly motivated patients were critical to pharma's business. Yet these, he believed, would only come when patients trusted big pharma a lot more: "We want people to feel they can snuggle up to us at night." And that could happen only at "the magic moment." What was the magic moment?" - Greg Critser, Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Get the book.) "Patients with high cholesterol and asthma who'd seen dtc ads were more likely to be aware of new drugs for those conditions than were those who hadn't viewed the spots. Ditto, yes? DTC ad viewers were also much more aware of a given drug's side effects than nonviewers. Who could argue with that? True, the Kaiser study showed the commercial bonus as well: 30 percent of DTC viewers go to their physicians in response to an ad, and 44 percent get a prescription for the advertised product. But Kessler did not say much about that." - Greg Critser, Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Get the book.) "The networks followed, featuring lead stories in prime time (and dtc ads later in the evening). Sales boomed. The Gilmartin way was working. Not only did it seem to work in the run-up and launch of Vioxx, a sexy drug by any measure, but also in the less glamorous compounds. Between 1995 and 2001, Merck launched seventeen new drugs, treating hypertension, elevated cholesterol, osteoporosis, male-pattern hair loss, GERD, acute pain, bacterial infection, and asthma." - Greg Critser, Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Get the book.)

"That is why dtc ads are prohibited in every other developed country (except New Zealand). The industry claims the ads are beneficial, because they stimulate people to go to their doctors for symptoms they had not previously recognized or thought could not be treated.20 But there are no properly controlled studies of the health effects of ads. Just about everyone is now exposed to the flood of drug ads on television, so it is impossible to compare their behavior with that of people not exposed to ads." - Marcia Angell, M.D., The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It (Get the book.) "It had only thirty reviewers to cull through the 34,000 dtc ads submitted to it in 2001.17 Nor can the agency verify whether it receives all the ads it is supposed to. In addition, the FDA under the Bush administration has deliberately adopted a go-slow policy. It is sending far fewer letters about misleading ads than it used to, and those it does send sometimes go out so late that the offending campaign has already run its course. Review by the FDA's legal office is now required before a letter is dispatched.18 Even when letters are sent promptly, they don't seem to be taken seriously." - Marcia Angell, M.D., The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It (Get the book.) "The great majority of dtc ads are for very expensive me-too drugs that require a lot of pushing because there is no good reason to think they are any better than drugs already on the market. There is overwhelming evidence that the ads work.16 People go to their doctors and ask for the new drugs, and very often get them. Furthermore, the ads not only increase the sales of the particular drug advertised but also increase sales for the class of drugs as a whole. In other words, an ad for Paxil increases sales for Zoloft and Celexa as well as for Paxil." - Marcia Angell, M.D., The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It (Get the book.) "DTC ads, $5.5 billion for visits to doctors, $10.5 billion for the retail value of free samples, and about $380 million for medical journal advertising.12 The trade association told everyone who would listen that this was much less than the $30.3 billion they spent on R 6c D that year. The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) and the media, unfortunately, repeated this assertion as though it were true." - Marcia Angell, M.D., The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It (Get the book.)

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