Sorry - dinner with people I love has got me home late... so just a few words.
The direct to consumer advertising by drug companies that I so LOATHE is apparently not as bad as I thought it would be, at least as far as outcomes go.
A BusinessWeek article explained that the billions of dollars spent by companies like Merck, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, and GlaxoSmithKline, etc to promote drug seeking behavior by patients only led to about 23 requests for drugs. These 23 requests were found in a study of over 12000 doctor patient conversations in 2008.
Furthermore, those annoying, often gross side effect voice overs ARE getting our attention. We tend not to remember the drug we saw advertised as much as we remember the bad things it could do to us. I was glad to see that the very expensive ads on anti depressant drug Cymbalta did not make it more popular and that sales of sleep aid Ambien actually went down!
The only winner mentioned in this article was Boniva. Apparently, Sally Field is a trustworthy spokesperson.
The article was quite good you might like to read it.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_46/b4155078964719.htm
No comments:
Post a Comment