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Straight Track #44 Should You Take Health Advice Hoey
& Farina Good health! It's something we all wish for our family, our friends and ourselves. We ran across this interesting article in the October 2000 issue of Consumer Reports and thought our railroad friends and their families might enjoy reading them. The following is another in a series of health-related articles that have been featured in Straight Track.
Should
You Take Health Advice Like many primary-care physicians, I have been besieged in recent years by patients requesting prescriptions for drugs they’ve seen advertised on TV or in print. Those direct-to-consumer (DTC) ads seldom provide reliable medical guidance. They may suggest a need where none exists, minimize side effects, or talk about the drug’s benefits in isolation, rather than in the context of other available medications and lifestyle treatments. Some examples:
CAUGHT IN THE STAMPEDE Until the mid-1980s, federal government restrictions discouraged drug manufacturers from advertising prescription medications directly to the public. Then in 1985 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decided to allow the pharmaceutical industry to bypass the physician and communicate directly with the public, as long as certain consumer safeguards were met. Under pressure from industry, the safe-guards – which included government screening of advertisements prior to release and the full disclosure of side effects – were relaxed in 1977. Those deregulatory changes unleashed a stampede of prescription-drug advertisements aimed at consumers to boost the demand for those drugs. The pharmaceutical industry poured roughly $2 billion into DTC advertising in 1999 – a 40 percent increase over the previous year – and is expected to raise it to $7.5 billion by 2005. SECOND-GUESSING THE DOCTOR No studies have evaluated whether DTC ads actually lead to better health care, but they’ve certainly altered the doctor-patient relationship. A survey of California residents found that advertisements prompted 35 percent to ask their doctor for more information about a drug; nearly 20 percent of them directly requested the drug. Of that group, almost half said they’d probably be disappointed if their prescription request weren’t granted, and some said they might switch doctors if the advertised drug were not prescribed. For the physician this could mean increasing pressure to acquiesce to those requests or risk alienating patients by refusing them. Concerned that DTC ads are usurping their medical authority, many physicians don’t think those ads are a good idea. Nonetheless, by prompting patients to see their doctor more often, these ads have also boosted physician income. THE NEED FOR SKEPTICISM Consumers should remember that advertising is advertising, whether it’s selling a car or a drug. The thrust of an ad may seem to be informational, but the information has been selected for the purpose of selling a product and is not necessarily dependable. Ads typically emphasize benefits and minimize drawbacks, so it’s important to seek an unbiased information source. According to an FDA survey, roughly one in three adults believe—incorrectly—that only the safest drugs are allowed to advertise. About the same number totally ignore the brief summary of side effects that accompanies many DTC advertisements. When you’re reading or listening to a drug ad, watch out for those ads that:
Marvin M. Lipman, M.D., has been Consumers Union’s chief medical adviser since 1967. He is a diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine (certified in endocrinology and metabolism) and is clinical professor of medicine emeritus at New York Medical College. |
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