12 ms·

The article seems to suggest this is a bad thing, but my first reaction is "fantastic". Pharmaceutical companies create life saving medicines and then use advan

by dools 5y ago

The article seems to suggest this is a bad thing, but my first reaction is "fantastic". Pharmaceutical companies create life saving medicines and then use advanced social media targeting to locate the people that need them. The only bad thing about it is if those people targeted can't afford the medication, which is why healthcare needs to be a universal right. People love to bitch about Big Pharma but I have a magical little blue tool that completely relieves my asthma, and I can buy them with absolutely no trouble at the pharmacy for about $6. My brother got diagnosed with MS recently. My aunt got diagnosed with MS 40 years ago. Thanks to the research that happened in the last 40 years, my brother's experience with MS is worlds apart (mostly because we live in Australia and he has free access to tens of thousands of dollars of treatment). Pharmaceutical companies are responsible for developing vaccines for a global pandemic at light speed. They're great! Let's celebrate Big Pharma! But let's also make sure that the gains from these amazing advances in technology are shared equitably. And maybe, just maybe, if the medical companies find they need to use Facebook to shift their product, we should be looking at a more formal and closely regulated method of distribution that isn't so commercially driven. I mean, the private sector is great at commercialisation, but is it really the be all and end all when it comes to such a crucial social function as healthcare?

refurb 5y ago
Let's go ahead and see what the FDA found out about direct to consumer (DTC) advertising of drugs as they've conducted numerous surveys[1]. Not all bad it seems! - Most physicians agreed that because their patient saw a DTC ad, he or she asked thoughtful questions during the visit. - Many physicians thought that DTC ads made their patients more involved in their health care. - Physicians thought the ads did not convey information about risks and benefits equally well. - Eight percent of physicians said they felt very pressured to prescribe the specific brand-name drug when asked. - The study demonstrated that when a patient asked about a specific drug, 88 percent of the time they had the condition that the drug treated. - Doctors believe that patients understand that they need to consult a health care professional about appropriate treatment. [1]https://www.fda.gov/drugs/information-consumers-and-patients-drugs/impact-direct-consumer-advertising https://www.fda.gov/drugs/information-consumers-and-patients...
thomasedwards 5y ago
Or, I go to a doctor, who is a medically trained professional, and they prescribe a medicine to me based on their experience and training, without any incentive for financial reward?
- jaspax 5y ago
  Do you think that doctors don't have financial incentives to treat patients?
  - throwaway3699 5y ago
    Not where I live. This is a uniquely US problem among first-world countries.
    - refurb 5y ago
      A financial incentive to treat? No, that's pretty common across healthcare systems. It's being worked on as system move away from fee-for-service, but generally, the more a physician does, the more they make.
    - mrweasel 5y ago
      Technically I don't think it's unique to the US. In Denmark doctors get a fee per consultation. It's pay with tax money, but still the doctor is financially motivated to see patients. It might only apply to general practitioner though, I think hospital doctors are on a fixed salary. One issue, that could excuse medical companies going directly to the patients would be a lack of knowledge among doctors. Doctors contently write prescriptions for medication that's no longer available and is often not as updated as a pharmacy on new medication. This means that at least some doctors aren't suggesting the best treatment, simply because they aren't aware of it.
      - varispeed 5y ago
        The doctor can also put a generic name of the drug on the prescription and patient can tell the pharmacy to sell them a particular brand instead of a generic. So there is space where such direct advertising could work.
lozenge 5y ago
You appear to be assuming the advertisement medically benefits a patient. I don't believe there's any evidence for this and ads for prescription drugs are banned almost globally for good reason. "Ask your doctor about" may bias the doctor away from a different drug that is more appropriate but has a lower profit margin, for example.
- toast0 5y ago
  There's some benefit to the patient if the drug is effective treatment for a condition they knew they had but didn't know there was treatment for. Or if it's a new thing that treats something where the old treatment didn't work well or had bothersome side effects for the patient. Major new drugs may get news coverage or may be brought up if a doctor sees something on your chart at a checkup, but ads may (or may not) reach more people.
fabcomm 5y ago
The vaccine has me thinking of these things, and my reaction was closer to yours. I don’t think ads here are fantastic. What I think is fantastic is companies wanting to remove the “dis” from “disease”. But we must not rely on pharmaceuticals. They are just a few tools in the tool belt of healing.
ceilingcorner 5y ago
Have you heard the expression, "A solution in search of a problem"? Because that what this is. Multinational billion-dollar corporations using their marketing dollars to convince people that their pill is the solution to all of your problems. This should be illegal.
- sizzle 5y ago
  It either is or it isn’t, at the end of the day a Doctor was taught what to prescribe at med school and you can’t demand they prescribe you anything unless you are a drug seeker and will be blacklisted quickly if it’s controlled substances. Go look at peer reviewed studies and clinical trials data to make an informed decision on medical treatment options.
rozab 5y ago
Why on earth should the patient choose whichever drug put money into advertising, rather than the one their doctor deems the most suitable? How could that possibly be beneficial? edit: reading further down the article, there is an advert for an antipsychotic medication which offers a $15 discount on your copay. This particular medication has serious discontinuation effects, it's not something you can just stop taking and it's not something that is prescribed lightly in the first place. Offering a discount for the first few doses is plainly exploitative.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  There are some aspects to the supply and demand of drugs, particularly psych drugs, that I'm not sure are described in econ 101 or popularly known. Let's say the most common, first prescribed drug for your condition is available in a generic, for $0.30/month. That's not entirely hypothetical, that really happens. A naive person would say "ok, if the generic is so cheap, then the brand name can't be much more, can it?" - free market competition, the FDA ensures they're all equivalent, blah blah blah. However, I noticed that in recent years, the alternatives to the dirt cheap first-line option are way more expensive and going up. So I thought about why. It occurred to me, that a simplistic view of competition ignores the fact that the different options are not exactly in competition at all. Because everyone tries the cheap one first, and then if they have problems or it's ineffective, they try another. This means that fundamentally the drugs which are supposed to be in competition are not in competition practically speaking. If you have a drug that is not the first option, then you might as well charge $1000/month because everyone who is a possible customer already by definition has given up on the cheap one. And even worse, in order to justify (for example) $1000/month, you don't have to have something better, just different enough to give people a little hope. They proliferate, but it's not progress.
s5300 5y ago
If the blue tool you're talking about is an inhaler, I'm happy for yours being $6, as was mine I believe, but some still aren't so fortunate. They still go for $300-$500 for some people, in the U.S. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/millions-skip-medications-due-to-their-high-cost-201501307673 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/millions-skip-medication... "Died because couldn't afford inhaler" will bring up some fairly good hits. Things have been fairly good, and are always mostly getting better - but damned if we couldn't be so, so much better than we are given the other things our country fronts billions upon billions of dollars for is the idea always lingering in my and others minds.
helloworld11 5y ago
I don't know why you were downvoted into the grey zone. I don't entirely agree with your points about Big Pharma finding needy patients instead of doctors prescribing based on professional experience (though there's still plenty of room for bias there too) but overall, fully agreed, the pharmaceutical industry is a wonderful thing on the whole, and while it gets a lot of knee-jerk hatred from too many people, i'd love to see somebody suggest something practically better (as opposed to ideally better based on their limitless dreams of a perfect world).
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  Maybe the bribery to get your Doctor to recommend a different drug than is probably best for you or your pocket book? Maybe the campaigns pushing opioids on doctors and patients to the point of crisis? Insulin is at least twice the price (depending on type might be 3 or 4 times) in the $US as anywhere else in the world. There's that famous case where a Turing Pharma skyrocketed price of Daraprim that only they were manufacturing because, well, they could get away with it.
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    "Insulin is at least twice the price" That is the government's fault. What's the reason you can't import extremely cheap insulin from overseas? The government has endowed a local monopoly.
    - Ensorceled 5y ago
      I don't think you can entirely blame unethical, predatory behaviour on the government that enables it.
      - fighterpilot 5y ago
        It's not a government that enables it, it's a government that enforces it through laws that guarantee and endow a local monopoly. Whenever you have an endowed monopoly without substitutes, you have extremely high prices. It's econ 101 and will happen 100% of the time (that's why I call it enforcement instead of enablement). If the government just got out of the way, the price of insulin would plummet.
pjc50 5y ago
Has everyone forgotten the OxyContin scandal? Or are we just all grateful that Big Pharma has saved us from the pandemic that we're going to overlook the past specific, illegal, actions of pharmaceutical marketing? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/ > When Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin in 1996, it was aggressively marketed and highly promoted. Sales grew from $48 million in 1996 to almost $1.1 billion in 2000.1 The high availability of OxyContin correlated with increased abuse, diversion, and addiction, and by 2004 OxyContin had become a leading drug of abuse in the United States.
- sizzle 5y ago
  So one company running wild without government intervention selling a controlled highly addictive narcotic negates all medical discoveries by big pharma since the dawn of time including the record breaking speed of making a COVID vaccine? Yeah okay…
StreamBright 5y ago
Yeah so I guess the users have nothing to say in this. If I walk in to store they supposed to know what I want and a clerk puts the items into my basket and kicks me towards the checkout. Are you serious?
LorenPechtel 5y ago
In almost all these cases the doctor should know what the patient needs, pushing patients to ask their doctors about certain medicines. The one case I think drug ads are legitimate is when it's a dramatic improvement in treatment for a live-with-it type condition. The prime example would be Viagra--before Viagra there were not any good options, a patient very well might not mention it to their doctor so the doctor wouldn't know to suggest it. Thus "talk to your doctor about new options for erectile dysfunction" ads should have been acceptable to run for a while. I'm not sure what the medical situation was when the overactive bladder ads were coming out, that one might also be acceptable. I can't think of anything else right now.

by dools 5y ago

refurb 5y ago

Let's go ahead and see what the FDA found out about direct to consumer (DTC) advertising of drugs as they've conducted numerous surveys[1]. Not all bad it seems! - Most physicians agreed that because their patient saw a DTC ad, he or she asked thoughtful questions during the visit. - Many physicians thought that DTC ads made their patients more involved in their health care. - Physicians thought the ads did not convey information about risks and benefits equally well. - Eight percent of physicians said they felt very pressured to prescribe the specific brand-name drug when asked. - The study demonstrated that when a patient asked about a specific drug, 88 percent of the time they had the condition that the drug treated. - Doctors believe that patients understand that they need to consult a health care professional about appropriate treatment. [1]https://www.fda.gov/drugs/information-consumers-and-patients-drugs/impact-direct-consumer-advertising https://www.fda.gov/drugs/information-consumers-and-patients...

thomasedwards 5y ago

Or, I go to a doctor, who is a medically trained professional, and they prescribe a medicine to me based on their experience and training, without any incentive for financial reward?

jaspax 5y ago
Do you think that doctors don't have financial incentives to treat patients?
- throwaway3699 5y ago
  Not where I live. This is a uniquely US problem among first-world countries.
  - refurb 5y ago
    A financial incentive to treat? No, that's pretty common across healthcare systems. It's being worked on as system move away from fee-for-service, but generally, the more a physician does, the more they make.
  - mrweasel 5y ago
    Technically I don't think it's unique to the US. In Denmark doctors get a fee per consultation. It's pay with tax money, but still the doctor is financially motivated to see patients. It might only apply to general practitioner though, I think hospital doctors are on a fixed salary. One issue, that could excuse medical companies going directly to the patients would be a lack of knowledge among doctors. Doctors contently write prescriptions for medication that's no longer available and is often not as updated as a pharmacy on new medication. This means that at least some doctors aren't suggesting the best treatment, simply because they aren't aware of it.
    - varispeed 5y ago
      The doctor can also put a generic name of the drug on the prescription and patient can tell the pharmacy to sell them a particular brand instead of a generic. So there is space where such direct advertising could work.

lozenge 5y ago

You appear to be assuming the advertisement medically benefits a patient. I don't believe there's any evidence for this and ads for prescription drugs are banned almost globally for good reason. "Ask your doctor about" may bias the doctor away from a different drug that is more appropriate but has a lower profit margin, for example.

toast0 5y ago
There's some benefit to the patient if the drug is effective treatment for a condition they knew they had but didn't know there was treatment for. Or if it's a new thing that treats something where the old treatment didn't work well or had bothersome side effects for the patient. Major new drugs may get news coverage or may be brought up if a doctor sees something on your chart at a checkup, but ads may (or may not) reach more people.

fabcomm 5y ago

The vaccine has me thinking of these things, and my reaction was closer to yours. I don’t think ads here are fantastic. What I think is fantastic is companies wanting to remove the “dis” from “disease”. But we must not rely on pharmaceuticals. They are just a few tools in the tool belt of healing.

ceilingcorner 5y ago

Have you heard the expression, "A solution in search of a problem"? Because that what this is. Multinational billion-dollar corporations using their marketing dollars to convince people that their pill is the solution to all of your problems. This should be illegal.

sizzle 5y ago
It either is or it isn’t, at the end of the day a Doctor was taught what to prescribe at med school and you can’t demand they prescribe you anything unless you are a drug seeker and will be blacklisted quickly if it’s controlled substances. Go look at peer reviewed studies and clinical trials data to make an informed decision on medical treatment options.

rozab 5y ago

Why on earth should the patient choose whichever drug put money into advertising, rather than the one their doctor deems the most suitable? How could that possibly be beneficial? edit: reading further down the article, there is an advert for an antipsychotic medication which offers a $15 discount on your copay. This particular medication has serious discontinuation effects, it's not something you can just stop taking and it's not something that is prescribed lightly in the first place. Offering a discount for the first few doses is plainly exploitative.

perl4ever 5y ago
There are some aspects to the supply and demand of drugs, particularly psych drugs, that I'm not sure are described in econ 101 or popularly known. Let's say the most common, first prescribed drug for your condition is available in a generic, for $0.30/month. That's not entirely hypothetical, that really happens. A naive person would say "ok, if the generic is so cheap, then the brand name can't be much more, can it?" - free market competition, the FDA ensures they're all equivalent, blah blah blah. However, I noticed that in recent years, the alternatives to the dirt cheap first-line option are way more expensive and going up. So I thought about why. It occurred to me, that a simplistic view of competition ignores the fact that the different options are not exactly in competition at all. Because everyone tries the cheap one first, and then if they have problems or it's ineffective, they try another. This means that fundamentally the drugs which are supposed to be in competition are not in competition practically speaking. If you have a drug that is not the first option, then you might as well charge $1000/month because everyone who is a possible customer already by definition has given up on the cheap one. And even worse, in order to justify (for example) $1000/month, you don't have to have something better, just different enough to give people a little hope. They proliferate, but it's not progress.

s5300 5y ago

If the blue tool you're talking about is an inhaler, I'm happy for yours being $6, as was mine I believe, but some still aren't so fortunate. They still go for $300-$500 for some people, in the U.S. https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/millions-skip-medications-due-to-their-high-cost-201501307673 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/millions-skip-medication... "Died because couldn't afford inhaler" will bring up some fairly good hits. Things have been fairly good, and are always mostly getting better - but damned if we couldn't be so, so much better than we are given the other things our country fronts billions upon billions of dollars for is the idea always lingering in my and others minds.

helloworld11 5y ago

I don't know why you were downvoted into the grey zone. I don't entirely agree with your points about Big Pharma finding needy patients instead of doctors prescribing based on professional experience (though there's still plenty of room for bias there too) but overall, fully agreed, the pharmaceutical industry is a wonderful thing on the whole, and while it gets a lot of knee-jerk hatred from too many people, i'd love to see somebody suggest something practically better (as opposed to ideally better based on their limitless dreams of a perfect world).

Ensorceled 5y ago
Maybe the bribery to get your Doctor to recommend a different drug than is probably best for you or your pocket book? Maybe the campaigns pushing opioids on doctors and patients to the point of crisis? Insulin is at least twice the price (depending on type might be 3 or 4 times) in the $US as anywhere else in the world. There's that famous case where a Turing Pharma skyrocketed price of Daraprim that only they were manufacturing because, well, they could get away with it.
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  "Insulin is at least twice the price" That is the government's fault. What's the reason you can't import extremely cheap insulin from overseas? The government has endowed a local monopoly.
  - Ensorceled 5y ago
    I don't think you can entirely blame unethical, predatory behaviour on the government that enables it.
    - fighterpilot 5y ago
      It's not a government that enables it, it's a government that enforces it through laws that guarantee and endow a local monopoly. Whenever you have an endowed monopoly without substitutes, you have extremely high prices. It's econ 101 and will happen 100% of the time (that's why I call it enforcement instead of enablement). If the government just got out of the way, the price of insulin would plummet.

pjc50 5y ago

Has everyone forgotten the OxyContin scandal? Or are we just all grateful that Big Pharma has saved us from the pandemic that we're going to overlook the past specific, illegal, actions of pharmaceutical marketing? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/ > When Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin in 1996, it was aggressively marketed and highly promoted. Sales grew from $48 million in 1996 to almost $1.1 billion in 2000.1 The high availability of OxyContin correlated with increased abuse, diversion, and addiction, and by 2004 OxyContin had become a leading drug of abuse in the United States.

sizzle 5y ago
So one company running wild without government intervention selling a controlled highly addictive narcotic negates all medical discoveries by big pharma since the dawn of time including the record breaking speed of making a COVID vaccine? Yeah okay…

StreamBright 5y ago

Yeah so I guess the users have nothing to say in this. If I walk in to store they supposed to know what I want and a clerk puts the items into my basket and kicks me towards the checkout. Are you serious?

LorenPechtel 5y ago

In almost all these cases the doctor should know what the patient needs, pushing patients to ask their doctors about certain medicines. The one case I think drug ads are legitimate is when it's a dramatic improvement in treatment for a live-with-it type condition. The prime example would be Viagra--before Viagra there were not any good options, a patient very well might not mention it to their doctor so the doctor wouldn't know to suggest it. Thus "talk to your doctor about new options for erectile dysfunction" ads should have been acceptable to run for a while. I'm not sure what the medical situation was when the overactive bladder ads were coming out, that one might also be acceptable. I can't think of anything else right now.