Consumer Advertising of Prescription Drugs

Timothy B. McCall, M.D.

Like a lot of physicians, I feel ambivalent about the ads for prescription drugs aimed at consumers that are increasingly blanketing television, newspapers and magazines. I’m all for patients knowing as much as possible about their health care. But I worry that drug ads sometimes cause more harm than good.

Drugs ads can provide useful information, but most are no more informative than, say, the average billboard for Newport cigarettes. The reason is that if they even tell you what the drug’s for, they’ve got to buy an extra page just to list the side effects. What we mostly wind up with are ads like the one that shows a woman gazing blissfully at a brilliant sky that says only: “Ask your doctor about Claritin.” Since they don’t tell you and you may be wondering, the drug is yet another antihistamine used to treat allergies.

Some argue that patients educated by drug ads force their doctors to learn about a wider range of medications that might be helpful and, maybe even less costly. That sounds pretty good but patients aren’t getting the full picture. Drug companies usually only spend advertising dollars on expensive drugs with huge profit margins. Very little goes to promote generic or less expensive name brands. At my local discount pharmacy, for example, Claritin goes for over two bucks a pill.

It’s also been suggested that consumers do such an excellent job of “self-medicating” with over-the-counter drugs that they can handle the onslaught of ads for prescription drugs. I wonder. It’s well known that the ingredients in many top-selling over the counter products are completely ineffective. Consumers aren’t really that experienced in weighing the pros and cons of far more powerful—and potentially more dangerous—prescription drugs. Even many doctors are unduly susceptible to drug company marketing efforts. In one study even doctors who felt they got their information from unbiased sources like top medical journals, accepted as fact incorrect notions which had been promoted in drug ads.

And let’s face facts. Pharmaceutical manufacturers want to sell their products, whether they’re needed or not, and even if there are safer, cheaper or more effective choices on the market. Drug ads may indeed provide consumers useful information, but that’s not the goal. Smart patients need to know what good doctors know—that drug ads are often misleading and manipulative. They provide consumers (and doctors) information with about as much objectivity as political ads. Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

Still I’m not sure we should ban ads for prescription drugs directed at consumers. Especially at a time when some managed care plans are forbidding doctors from informing patients about effective, but costly, options the plan doesn’t want to pay for, consumers need as much information as possible. Part of the solution may be in equipping the public to interpret the claims made in drug ads. Newspapers and television reports could analyze them for accuracy as they are now regularly doing with political ads.

In the meantime I’m still waiting for the ad that says “Ask your doctor about generic ibuprofen.” After all, it’s the brand preferred by more doctors.

Health Care Without Harm

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