Reply #78: That's a scattershot approach....it strikes me as inadequate.

[Liberal Veteran]

Not to mention that NEARLY ALL of the drugs advertised on tv are either:

a) New to the market
b) Copycats of a current drug (think Vioxx and Celebrex)
c) The priciest drug on the market
d) Not necessarily better or more effective than something on the market for 20 years, just NEW.

Trying to equate these very expensive and very inadequate ads as public service announcements is not intellectually honest.

Take my own example as a person with advanced HIV disease. At least once a week I hit up the various websites that concern themselves with treatment and management of the disease and it's side effects. I also read newspaper articles about new drugs that are approved for my condition. I have taken responsibility to educate myself and am doing a pretty good job of it without the need for a primetime tv commercial telling me to ask my doctor if the latest NNRTI/Fusion Inhibitor/NRTI/PI is right for me.

Also, in some cases the advertisements can be detrimental. Take for example the flap that you probably never heard of, where DTC marketing in gay publication always showed the hot, hot, muscular guy mountainclimbing/skiing/biking etc, advertising a certain HIV drug. Giving false impressions that if you take this drug, you'll actually feel like doing any of those things.

Here is a link to a particular article on that issue:

http://www.sfaf.org/treatment/beta/b37/b37drugads.html

I don't want you to get the impression that I am against an informed consumer/patient. Indeed, I think that these ads are an expensive and counterproductive to really getting people to take responsibility for their health and education about their illnesses and treatments. There are FAR FAR more effective ways to educate people than these piss poor excuses for information that we see on television. And they are probably a lot less expensive too.