I guess this is a pretty US centric question but I see so many commercials for drugs to treat very specific and/or life threatening conditions. If I had one of these conditions, I would hope I wouldn’t need to “Ask my doctor about…” a drug, but rather they would just, ya know, *prescribe* it to me. Are there really enough people with diagnosed conditions who’s doctors haven’t prescribed them the corresponding treatment that these commercials are effective? I’ve never really understood it but obviously they must be effective if there’s so many of them on TV.
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It’s easy to hate these ads, but the days before they were allowed wasn’t so great either. In that era, no advertising could be done for prescription medicines except directly to doctors. But what is “advertising”? The drug companies couldn’t print brochures on their drugs for doctors to give out to patients because that could be advertising. The drug companies wouldn’t even answer a letter if you wrote them with specific questions (back when letters were like email). I know because my dad was taking some pretty heavy-duty chemo drugs and I wanted to know a bit more about them but had zero luck (their letter said “ask your doctor” but we had plenty to discuss with the doctor already)
Because ads are allowed, drug companies now have web sites were you can research drugs on your own time. If advertising was not allowed, I suspect these web sites would be gone.
Yeah, big Pharma does lots of creepy things and these ads aren’t great. . .but they also aren’t absolutely evil either.
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