The Ethics Of Prescription Drug Advertising

Drug advertising is a common kind of advertising that we keep seeing reiteratively. It is growing really fast that anytime, anywhere a pharmaceutical product advertisement jumps up, on T.V’s, streets, malls, markets and even on radios. I presume that kind of advertising should not exist at all. Drugs or pharma consolations and prescriptions should only be taken directly from a doctor or a pharmacist, not from an advertisement of a pharmaceutical company whose only goal is to increase the amount of selling their product. Advertising prescription drugs to the public may harm some people, who follow every advertisement item they observe. Pharmaceutical companies and advertising companies are the only two corporations having the benefit of advertising

Therefore, doctors will take a lot of time to explain to patients why they may have been misled by the drug advertisements they have seen. Prescription drug advertising might force the physicians to prescribe particular medications, and often they would be the ones that are less effective and more expensive as well as having more side effects. Dr. Angell said: “There is this kind of marketing that is designed to convince people that they need pills. And then it's designed to convince them that they need particular pills that happen to be more expensive, or [are] just going on patent rather than coming off. And then armed with this feeling, the consumer goes to the physician, who often just prescribes the pills. It's a buyer's market here. Doctors don't want to lose patients. They don't want to say no to patients. They're in some sense too busy to say no to patients. They are forced to see more and more patients more and more rapidly. It's faster to write out a prescription than it is to try to talk with the patient and convince the patient that he or she may have”. (Angell, 2003). Wasting doctors’ time is not the best fact a patient could do to be

Just exactly what Gary Ruskin said “Pharmaceutical 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.”(Ruskin, 2010). As a result of doing all these advertisements the cost of drugs will increase, therefore the public will get affected. DR. Robert M. Centor, director of the division of general Internal Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, stated the following: “Direct-to-consumer drug advertising works very well - for pharmaceutical company profits, BUT not for the public health. Drug advertising results in more costly prescriptions. Few inexpensive drugs are advertised on TV. The commercials don't educate patients. Rather, they create a demand for a product based on an effective commercial rather than the patient's medical need...” he also said “Direct-to-consumer ads should be banned. Doctors and patients have much to gain. Only the pharmaceutical industry has anything to lose."(Centon, 2010). Gary Ruskin authored the following statement: “Pharmaceutical 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