Healthy Skepticism Library item: 20093

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Magazine

Rodger S
Pills for ills
NZ Listener 2000 Jun 24

Full text:

To provide some balance to the cover story ‘Pill Pushers’ (June 27), research conducted by the Researched Medicines Industry shows that there are considerable public health benefits arising from direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription medicines.

These benefits range from encouraging people to seek medical attention for conditions that might otherwise go untreated, to promoting patient compliance with prescribed medication, and improving the efficiency of public health care spending. The government through the Health Funding Authority is aware of these benefits insofar as it also engages in DTC advertising, for example, of the flu vaccine, Fluarix.

The commercial incentive by pharmaceutical companies to advertise medicines can be successfully harnessed by New Zealand society to its own public health ends, if it approaches the task intelligently. Most advertising is devoted to medicines treating conditions for which consumers are unlikely to seek medical attention unprompted, and between what medical research has discovered (new therapies and best practice guides) and what doctors and patients actually know.

A glance at the list of prescription medicines being advertised on television in New Zealand will reveal that they are largely aimed at conditions affecting men, who are traditionally reluctant to visit their doctor, or aimed at conditions that are generally under-diagnosed and/or under-treated, including obesity, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes (erectile disfunction is a common side-effect of diabetes), hepatitis and asthma.

By encouraging patients to visit their doctors to discuss therapies for these conditions before they become life-threatening and/or require hospitalisation, direct-to-consumer advertising actually improve public health and the efficiency of public health spending.

The RMI also takes issue with a number of Noel O’Hare’s assertions, DTC advertising can hardly be accused of unnecessarily driving up costs when, for example only 30,000 New Zealanders are being treated with statins for high cholesterol out of the 100,000 who actually qualify for subsidised access to these life-saving medicines, or when the medicines being advertised are not subsidised at all, as is mostly the case.

Furthermore, there is no link whatsoever between DTC advertising, adverse drug reactions and the growth of antibiotic resistance levels. Even the sources quoted do not link these issues; yet the ‘Listener’ chose to do so.

The Prevention magazine study of DTC advertising in the United States, which indicated that 80 percent of doctors agreed to prescribe a medicine requested by the patient, should not be used to suggest that these patients did not need this medication. This flies in the face of the study’s conclusions, which were favourable towards DTC advertising and its benefits for patient care.

I note that neither the Ministry of Health MedSafe, which is responsible for regulating medicines advertising, nor the Researched Medicines Industry Association was approached for comment for the article, and yet we are the sources that could be expected to know the most about the topic.