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Med School Profs Cauterize Drug Ads

October 28, 2005
Don't you just hate those overactive bladder, erectile dysfunction and diabetes ads that threaten to crowd out the nightly news? Guess what -- so do 200 medical school professors who are calling for an end to direct-to-consumer prescription drug ads.

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Prominent medical school professors from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Stanford, Yale, Duke, University of California-San Francisco and other top medical schools, along with two former editors in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine have all signed a statement that will be presented to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) next week.

"In 2004, pharmaceutical companies spent more than $4 billion in an onslaught of advertising to promote prescription drugs. This advertising does not promote public health. It increases the cost of drugs and the number of unnecessary prescriptions, which is expensive to taxpayers, and can be harmful or deadly to patients," the professors said.

The med school profs complained that prescription drug advertising causes patients to pressure their doctors to prescribe particular medications, even if they are less effective, more expensive and more dangerous than other drugs.

"This intrudes in the relationship between medical professionals and patients, and disrupts the therapeutic process. It takes up valuable time to explain to patients why they may have been misled by the drug advertisements they have seen," the professors said.

The statement condemned drug ads as "inherently misleading" and said they are not educational and do not contribute to public health.

Drug advertising "should not exist unless accompanied by the full FDA-approved label," the doctors said. "Nor should drug ads be allowed to display imagery that is primarily emotive and not educational. Drug ads on TV and radio should be prohibited because they cannot meet this standard for truthfulness."

The effort was organized by the nonprofit advocacy group Commercial Alert in preparation for next week's two-day FDA public hearings. The agency has been cracking down on prescription drug marketing and the hearings could lead to more restrictions on direct-to-consumer drug ads.

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