Early evening turns the world of television to a landscape of prescription drug ads, usually peopled with “patients” enjoying affluent lifestyles. The ads are bland and saccharine until they conclude with lists of side effects. The side effects, rattled off so fast they’re hard to hear, are so scary that the contrast between them and the syrupy commercials they follow is bizarre.
“Serious muscle problems that can lead to kidney problems;” is it really worth the risk to take a well-known cholesterol med instead of just cutting back on cheese, butter and ice cream? “Sudden loss or decrease in hearing;” “sudden decrease or loss of vision in one or both eyes;” yeeks! Sex or your hearing? Your sight?
It used to be that prescription meds couldn’t be advertised on television, the assumption being that doctors knew best what to prescribe, and that for patients to put pressure on them because of something they saw on the tube would likely lead to no good result. Now the pharmaceutical industry spends over $4 billion a year on advertising directed at consumers (less than the $6 billion-plus it spends on sales contacts and ads targeting doctors), according to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation. (Incidentally, contrary to industry claims, the total advertising tab is almost double what the drugmakers spend on R and D.)
A poll by Social Science Research Solutions published in November’s AARP Bulletin tackled the question of what the industry gets for its expensive investment in consumer advertising. The central question was: “Have you ever asked your doctor for a prescription you saw in an ad?”
Given the way the ads have made household words out of faux-Latin names like Nexium, or Lipitor, a handle fit for the fuhrer of a nation of aliens, the results of the poll are somewhat surprising. Only 11 percent of respondents between 18 and 49, and only 9 percent of those 50 and over, said they had bugged their doctors for a prescription because of an ad. Eighty-nine percent of younger respondents, and 91 percent of older ones, said they never had.
So who’s the winner here? The media that get the ad money, apparently. According to the poll, it’s on television that most people (74 percent of those aged 18-49, 84 percent of those 50 and over) see drug ads, though the young, more than the old, also hear them on the radio or see them on the Internet. Maybe people are listening to those rapid-fire inventories of side effects. Or maybe they’re suffering from post-Vioxx syndrome, having heard too much about the benefits of drugs that later proved dangerous if not fatal.
