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Quotes about Direct-to-consumer from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"Direct-to-consumer ads is a new trend and one that is predicted to strengthen; in 1997 drug companies spent about $1 billion on direct-to-consumer ads, but by 2004 that number had increased to more than $4 billion. Drug companies rely so much on profit generated from drugs, especially new ones attached to active patents, that they've begun persuasive marketing campaigns targeting consumers direcuy. In doing so, many times they will angle an ad to make you think you need this pill or that potion to live a healthier, longer life (as in "Ask your doctor if X is right for you."" - Brenda Watson and Leonard Smith, The Detox Strategy: Vibrant Health in 5 Easy Steps (Get the book.) "You may have noticed the deluge of advertisements from drug companies in the media in the past several years. direct-to-consumer ads is a new trend and one that is predicted to strengthen; in 1997 drug companies spent about $1 billion on direct-to-consumer ads, but by 2004 that number had increased to more than $4 billion. Drug companies rely so much on profit generated from drugs, especially new ones attached to active patents, that they've begun persuasive marketing campaigns targeting consumers direcuy." - Brenda Watson and Leonard Smith, The Detox Strategy: Vibrant Health in 5 Easy Steps (Get the book.)

"Redmond, Wash., a direct-to-consumer DNA testing firm. Prozac: Abstracts of Recent Scientific Research_ Fluoxetine dose-increment related akathisia in depression: implications for clinical care, recognition and management of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor-induced akathisia.Hansen L.- Department of Psychiatry, Royal South Hants, Southampton, UK. lh4@soton.ac.uk J Psychopharma-col. 2003 Dec;17(4):451-2. We report the case of a 22-year-old woman presenting major depressive episode with severe akathisia after an increase in fluoxetine." - Gary Null and Amy McDonald, The Food-Mood Connection: Nutrition-based and Environmental Approaches to Mental Health and Physical Wellbeing (Get the book.)

"Four years later, the pharmaceutical industry got its foot in the door when the FDA agreed to allow "direct-to-consumer" (DTC) advertising. But the rules were strict, and the content of the ads was, therefore, limited: Drugs could be mentioned by name, but advertisements that discussed the treatment of specific conditions were required to include a lengthy list of side effects and contraindications (situations in which the drug should not be used). As a result, the ads were vague and unfocused, primarily brand-awareness campaigns designed to smooth the way at the doctor's office." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.) "As explained by Alan Holmer, president of PhRMA, in a recent issue of JAMA, direct-to-consumer advertising "is an excellent way to meet the growing demand for medical information, empowering consumers by educating them about health conditions and possible treatments." Studies show, however, that drug ads usually stay away from the facts that count. Researchers from Dartmouth Medical School found that only 13 percent of drug ads in magazines used data to describe drug benefits; the remaining 87 percent relied on vague statements. Not a single ad in the study mentioned the cost of the drug." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.) "Perhaps most telling, the survey showed that the people who are most misinformed about drug ads are also the most supportive of direct-to-consumer drug advertising. The drug companies capitalize on the public's naivete about their marketing techniques. Two-thirds of drug ads create a positive emotional association with the drug they represent. Recall for a moment the image of the former Olympic champion Dorothy Hamill lacing up her skates—a beautiful aging athlete smiling and renewed. Who wouldn't want to feel like that?" - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.)

"In North America, where direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs has been legal for some years, since the mid-1990s pharmaceutical companies have trebled the amount of money they spend on advertising these drugs to consumers. From 1996 to 2000 spending on ads rose from $791 million to nearly $2.5 billion. See: Rosenthal MB, Berndt ER, Donohue JM, Frank RG, Epstein AM. Promotion of prescription drugs to consumers. N Engl J Med, 2002;346:498-505. Lee TH, Brennan TA. direct-to-consumer marketing of high-technology screening tests. N Engl J Med, 2002;346:529-31. Holmer AF." - Martin J. Walker, HRT Licensed to Kill and Maim: The Unheard Voices of Women Damaged by Hormone Replacement Therapy (Get the book.)

"The next drug to take center stage in direct-to-consumer advertising was Vioxx. Merck spent more than $160 million to advertise this new and supposedly "improved" arthritis drug to consumers in 2000—half again more than its closest rival and $20 million more than the previous record set by Claritin in 1999. Overcoming the lack of scientific evidence that Vioxx provides better relief or is safer for most patients than its less expensive competitors, sales of Vioxx grew more than any other drug in 2000, to $1.1 billion." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.)

"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." - Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George, The Myth of Alzheimer's: What You Aren't Being Told About Today's Most Dreaded Diagnosis (Get the book.)

"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." - Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs (Get the book.)

"Spending on direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs has tripled between 1996 and 2000 to $2.5 billion (which is only 15 percent of the pharmaceutical marketing budget) and reached $4 billion by 2004. Vioxx led the charge. In short order Celebrex and Vioxx each accounted for revenues that exceeded $3 billion per year. Merck and Pfizer convinced consumers and prescribers that their coxibs are worth the considerable extra expense compared to inexpensive over-the-counter aspirin and other nsaids." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.)

"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." - J. Douglas Bremner, Before You Take that Pill: Why the Drug Industry May Be Bad for Your Health (Get the book.) "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." - J. Douglas Bremner, Before You Take that Pill: Why the Drug Industry May Be Bad for Your Health (Get the book.)

"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." - Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea, What If Medicine Disappeared? (Get the book.)

"It has legalized dangerous prescription drugs and supported the use of mind hacks by legalizing direct-to-consumer advertising in 1997. That's what allowed drug manufacturers to go out across the airwaves and reach consumers directly with bogus advertising claims. If it weren't for direct-to-consumer advertising, we never would have had the Vioxx scandal we are seeing today. We never would have had skyrocketing sales of Viagra, Bextra or Celebrex ?drugs that consumers are now demanding from their doctors. It is the FDA that has created an environment in which dangerous drugs can flourish." - Mike Adams, Spam Filters for Your Brain (Get the book.)

"Merck plowed millions of dollars into direct-to-consumer ads, including a television spot featuring Olympic ice-skating champion Dorothy Hamill, who told viewers her arthritis had gotten so bad that she nearly had to stop skating until her doctor prescribed Vioxx. In parallel campaigns to market the drug to doctors, code-named "Project Offense" and "XXceleration," the company instructed its sales representatives to emphasize Vioxx's protective effects against gastrointestinal bleeds and to tell doctors that this benefit 210 outweighed any possible cardiac risks." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"The Beleaguered Prostate Interspersed between all the direct-to-consumer drug advertisements, the hawking of the latest procedures and gimmicks by providers, and the boasting of the prowess of the local or not-so-local hospital are the announcements of health-promotion, disease-prevention, public-service programs. Your friendly health insurer is inducing you to check your cholesterol and blood sugar so that you can be treated early. Someone is urging colonoscopy, others newfangled mammography or total body ct scans, or the like. Blood-pressure cuffs dot the landscape. Health fairs abound." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.)

"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." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "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." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.) "Network executives saw the pharmaceutical industry as a vast, untapped source of ad revenue, while ad agencies viewed direct-to-consumer ads as their clients' best hope for extracting as much profit as possible from their drugs before their patents ran out. By the early 1990s, pharmaceutical executives, who only a few years before had been aghast at the idea of pushing their drugs on the public, had come around to the notion that patients might even benefit from advertising—that consumers had a right to know about drugs." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"It has been argued that treating physicians must assist their patients in interpreting the barrage of direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing (Rosenthal et al. 2002). Sidney Wolfe (2002) has further argued, "The education of patients ?or physicians ?is too important to be left to the pharmaceutical industry, with its pseudoedu- cational campaigns designed, first and foremost, to promote drugs." Relman (2003) echoes this plea. However, the campaigns are pervasive and now part of the fabric of American medicine." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.) "For all I know, a few will come to regret that the "standard of care" practiced by their physician and the direct-to-consumer marketing on television, by a former football coach, was allowed to color the sense that they were well. Ten percent of all drugs approved for marketing by the fda between 1975 and 1999 were subsequently either withdrawn from the market because of adverse reactions or labeled with a "black box" indicating special hazards." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.)

"This has been particularly obvious since 1998, when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lifted a moratorium that had prevented the pharmaceutical industry from engaging in direct-to-consumer advertising. Since that time, pharmaceutical companies have devoted the lion's share of their annual advertising budget's product promotion on television and radio, as well as in newspapers, consumer magazines, and on Internet websites." - Shari Lieberman, Alan Xenakis, Mineral Miracle: Stopping Cartilage Loss & Inflammation Naturally (Get the book.)

"With other organisations linked to the industry, they successfully lobbied the Commission to propose allowing industry to The European patient provide direct-to-consumer (DTC) 'information' about prescription medicines.1 Moves to allow pharma companies to communicate more directly with potential customers show, perhaps better than any other single issue or incident, how much industry wants the public on side. The value to the public of being so closely aligned with pharma thinking, however, is less clear." - Jacky Law, Big Pharma: Exposing the Global Healthcare Agenda (Get the book.)

"They're accused of placing profit over people and cranking out products that are not as safe or effective as the direct-to-consumer advertisements would suggest. They encourage you to "just ask your doctor" about taking an antidepressant to cheer you up, or a sedative to help you sleep, followed by a rapid-fire list of side effects. In her scathing book, The Truth about the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do about It (Random House, 2004), Marcia Angell, M.D." - Hyla Cass, Supplement Your Prescription: What Your Doctor Doesn't Know About Nutrition (Get the book.)

"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." - Greg Critser, Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Get the book.)

"Although most Psyllium-containing products offer direct-to-consumer sales, many can be found on the shelves of your neighborhood grocery store or pharmaceutical outlet. Psyllium has even been included in breakfast cereals marketed at reducing cholesterol by being "heart healthy." After all (or so the consumer is meant to think), if it's included in breakfast cereal, there can't be anything unsafe about it—right? These products' manufacturers must be aware of the risk of using psyllium, as they include warnings on the labels similar to the ones below (chosen randomly from actual products)." - Dr. Edward F. Group III, DC, ND, DACBN, Health Begins in the Colon (Get the book.)

"An astonishing $219 million was allocated just for direct-to-consumer advertisements; advertisements which claimed Nexium was even better than Prilosec.2 Yet Nexium is the same drug, so how can it be better? It's not, but in order to prove that it is, the company set up clinical trials where patients were given small doses (20mg) of Prilosec and full doses (up to 40mg) of Nexium.3 An unfair comparison? People ought to go to prison for this kind of dishonesty." - Dr. Timothy Scott, America Fooled: The Truth About Antidepressants, Antipsychotics and How We've Been Deceived (Get the book.)

"This type of promotion is commonly called direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising and it is designed to sell drugs by getting people to wonder whether or not a drug is "right for them." Drugs and DTC advertising are a perfect fit for drug companies. But does it make sense for drug companies to have the ability to advertise directly to consumers merely to improve sales, when drugs are not always necessary or effective and have numerous risks?" - Craig Pepin-Donat, The Big Fat Health and Fitness Lie (Get the book.)

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