Summary: Direct-To-Consumer Advertising

Defined by the American Academy of Physician Assistants (AAPA), “Direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) is the promotion directly to potential patients of prescription drugs through newspaper, magazine, television, and internet marketing” (1). This type of direct communication allows drug manufacturers to take advantage of its consumer’s lack of medical background and knowledge by promoting products directly to consumers in ways that could manipulate them. During drug manufacturer advertisements, consumers may be given false ideas of potential results and effectiveness of advertised medications. Pharmaceutical companies should not be allowed to advertise directly to its consumers because direct-to-consumer drug advertisements may misinform patients …show more content…
Even though the United States is only home to 5% of the world’s entire population, it also “accounts for 42% of global prescription drug spending.” These statistics indicate that nearly half of the entire world’s prescription drug users are currently being influenced by prescription drug advertisements. According to Donald L. Sullivan, direct-to-consumer advertising began as the result of an accident. Syntex Inc., introduced a new anti-inflammatory medication that gained popularity and quickly became the main topic of conversation among the public. As a result of these discussions, the prescribing of this new medication increased dramatically (32). The first known direct-to-consumer advertisement was in the 1980’s by the company Pfizer Inc., who began a campaign known as “Partners in Healthcare,” the goal of this campaign was “to increase consumer awareness of undiagnosed diseases such as diabetes, angina, arthritis, and hypertension” (32). Direct-to-consumer advertising has not always been legal, says Bryan A. Liang and Tim K. Mackey in “It’s Time to Shine the Light on Direct-to-Consumer Advertising”, direct-to-consumer advertising “experienced rapid growth in the United States when the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) first liberalized its use in the 1980s and 1990s. An estimated 330% rise in DTCA spending from 1996 to 2005 …show more content…
This caused an increase of self-diagnosis and specific prescribing requests by patients (Mackey 83). Elizabeth C. Melby says that the FDA’s new guidelines for direct-to-consumer advertising released in 1997 required drug manufacturer’s to include the product warnings and fine print in their advertisements. The original intent was to increase “consumer access to prescription drug information” (Melby 328). Unfortunately, these new guidelines instead resulted in an increase in major drug manufacturer’s direct access to its consumers with a focus of increasing sales, rather than increasing consumer understanding (328). In Direct-to-Consumer Prescription Drug Advertising and the Cultivation Theory, Ashley A. Wood reported an increase of direct-to-consumer advertising in the United States:
By the year 2000, direct-to-consumer advertising became a 2.6 billion dollar industry with about 2% of total prescription drug expenditures. Direct-to-consumer advertising became the channel of choice for reaching pharmaceutical customers (Parmar & Arundhati, 2003). By 2001 the 24 most heavily advertised drugs were for chronic conditions. These chronic conditions included: allergy relief, anti-ulcer, anti-obesity, male pattern baldness, smoking cessation, erectile dysfunction, anti-diabetic, antiviral, bladder control, anti-migraine, asthma, anti-depressants, anti-arthritic, and Alzheimer’s