The Truth About Direct-to-Consumer Medication Ads

Well, hi there, and welcome friends of Tahoe Forest Health System. My name is Dr. Brian Evans, I’m the chief medical officer here for the Health System, and today I just wanted to introduce the subject of direct to consumer advertisement of medications. You might not be aware of this, but the United States is only one of two industrialized countries that allows that. It’s actually illegal to do television commercials specifically for medications. New Zealand happens to be the other one for some reason, but no other industrialized countries allow this. There’s been quite a controversy about that – you’ve probably seen many commercials for different types of pharmaceutical products out there advertising cures for all kinds of things. Some might say well this is a good thing for free speech and it’s a good thing to maybe bring awareness to certain diseases and make it something that we talk about and learn more about. But there are some significant concerns from the medical community about direct consumer advertisement of medications. First of all, it really encourages trade name or brand name drugs as opposed to generics and they are always more expensive than generics. It also makes complex medical illnesses and situations somewhat simplified in a way that is not particularly helpful. It puts pressure on patients to maybe think they should get a medication to solve a problem and sometimes coerce their physician into giving them the medication. It’s not always the best thing for them. They they tend to minimize the side effects that are brought about by some of these medications. What we’re encouraging patients to do is if they see a commercial they see an ad for a drug that they may be interested in please do some additional research on it. Do some independent research on it, talk to your physician about what to do about that medication. It may or may not be a good thing for you but it’s certainly an interesting trend in the United States and probably a significant contributor to the increasing health care cost that we all see in our country. Anyway there’s always more to the story. I appreciate you guys focusing on your health, learning about your medical conditions and using our health system as a partner so that we can all be healthier as a result thank you very much for listening.