Should Marketing Drugs to Consumers Be Banned?

Marketing to Consumers

There has been a controversial whether or not we should have a law forbidding all direct-to-consumer advertising by pharmaceutical companies. From my point of view, I disagree to the argument that all the advertisements targeting directly to the patients should be banned. To me, direct-to-customer (DTC) advertising seems to have some merits that can outweigh its drawbacks to some extent. The point is that the companies should continue to conduct this kind of marketing effort but strict regulations and cautious oversight by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of each particular country must be emphasized in order to prevent the undesirable outcomes of DTC advertising.

Data from the New England Journal of Medicine shows that DTC advertising only accounted for 15 percent of total drug promotional expenditures despite triple increase between 1996 and 2002. This means, DTC advertising still occupy only a small proportion of the budgets used to advertise pharmaceutical products. In addition, there is an article from Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revealing that the average number of prescriptions written for newly approved drugs with DTC advertising was nine times greater than those without DTC advertising. Nevertheless, the drugs that pharmaceutical companies heavily advertise are not the same as the ones they do not advertise. The companies usually focus their DTC advertising budgets on the drugs that are able to treat a large number of patients, and this type of drugs are generally prescribed much more by the physicians than the drugs that can only treat some rare diseases regardless of the types of promotional efforts.

In terms of the patients, direct-to-consumer advertising help creating awareness of certain diseases prompting patients to seek medical attention and motivating them to be more active partners in the patient-doctor relationship. Moreover, patients are also more aware of the treatment options available for particular illnesses, and the potential side effects of taking these treatments. This has been an arguing issue because some may challenge that the increased concern of patients caused by DTC advertising can put more workloads on physicians by requiring them to give their patients the correct information of the treatments and the patients themselves may lose trust in physicians, thinking that they don't receive enough information on the diseases and treatments from professionals. In my opinion, patients have every right to question physicians on both the treatments they are taking and the treatments that they are not. Physicians are also responsible for educating and providing medical information to their patients on the rationale behind prescribing any particular treatment.

Without a doubt, the main purpose of pharmaceutical companies in advertising their products directly to consumers is to boost demand for their products and consequently increase the maximum price threshold that consumers are willing to buy. As a result, the companies gain more revenue from the increase in quantity and price of sold products. One argument against DTC advertising in which it probably leads to inappropriate and unnecessary prescribing seems to be exaggerated. Even though DTC advertising is able to raise demand for specific products of the patients, it may not translate into more prescriptions for the advertised drugs since the final prescribing decisions still depend on physicians. Requests for particular medications from patients should have less importance in influencing a physician's decisions than other factors such as patients'