Drug Company Advertising


Because the greatest drug company profits come from prescription medications, most drug company advertising is directed toward physicians. Drug companies spend billions of dollars per year—about $10,000 per year per physician— trying to persuade doctors to prescribe drugs that the companies manufacture. Drug companies send sales representatives to doctors’ offices, hospitals, and health maintenance organizations to inform them of their products and to leave free samples. Drug companies sponsor seminars and courses often accompanied by free meals or vacations to update physicians on the diagnosis and treatment of particular diseases (for which the company offers a drug). And drug company advertising supports the publication of almost all professional medical magazines. Doctors often say that their medical judgment is not influenced by these obvious attempts at persuasion, but research shows otherwise (Spurling et al., 2010). Moreover, drug companies would not spend so much money promoting their products to physicians if it were not profitable.

In addition to physicians and other healthcare professionals, consumers also are targets of prescription drug advertising, especially in magazines and on TV. In 1997, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) relaxed its regulations regarding the advertising of prescription drugs directly to consumers (the United States and New Zealand are the only industrialized nations that permit this), and pharmaceutical companies quickly found that direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) is very profitable.

Direct-to-consumer advertising is designed to encourage consumers to demand advertised drugs from their doctors in the belief that the drugs they see advertised are superior to unadvertised, lesser known drugs. This creates pressure on doctors to prescribe advertised drugs even if other, equally effective (and sometimes more effective!) and certainy less costly medications are available, and even if no drug is medically warranted. Many doctors are “rated” by their emplyers, so they do not want to make patients angry.

Since the inception of DTCA, the FDA and medical organizations have frequently chastised pharmaceutical companies for making misleading claims in their advertising. In general, DTCA overstates or overemphasizes the benefits of a drug while not making clear the measured efficacy of the drug or the known risks of taking it.

The Internet plays a role in DTCA, too. Many websites carry ads for drugs. And many that purport to offer information about a particular medical condition are merely fronts for the advertising and sale of particular drugs. To get more information about a medical condition, a visitor to these websites may fill out a form or leave an e-mail address, only to become the recipient of a discount coupon and spam for for a medication.

Proponents of DTCA say it benefits consumers by making them more aware of both illnesses and medications and encourages them to seek medical advice and attention when they otherwise might not. Opponents of DTCA argue that it often makes it difficult for doctors to prescribe appropriate medications and that it creates a demand for drugs in lieu of non-drug treatments and disease prevention. Moreover, DTCA reinforces the general message that a drug is the first-line response to any health or medical problem.

Only one in 10,000 drugs that initially show promise in the laboratory is ever tested in people. Of that group of chemicals, only one in five ever gets approved. Because the pharmaceutical company developing the drug pays for all the testing— at a cost of many millions of dollars per new drug—any drug that is approved needs to sell well to make up for the costs of drugs that never make it to market. The drugs Celebrex and Bextra were approved in the late 1990s to reduce arthritis pain. They were advertised heavily in magazines and on TV, and within a few years they were generating enormous profits. However, in 2005, the FDA halted the advertising of Celebrex and Bextra, citing that the ads were misleading about the risks of heart disease and stroke associated with taking those drugs. When it comes to heavily advertised prescription drugs, consum