Have you seen TV ads promoting prescription drugs? What? If you haven't you are either the worlds best hermit, or lying, or don't watch TV, I suppose. Otherwise, we are all inundated with this stupid wasteful info. Why don't doctors just prescribe the drugs that work.

The answer must be that the ads work, and that doctors and patients are people too, and swayed by advertising. But the reality is that every dollar spent on drug advertising is a dollar taken out of someone's pocket. While the TV ads are highly visible, the even scarier fact is that the drug companies spend even more money addressing doctors directly. Makers of brand-name drugs employ more than 90,000 sales people in the US, at a cost of more than 12 billion dollars a year.

Brand name drugs are not always the best, and certainly not always the cheapest. In a perfect world, drug adverising would be illegal, and drug effectiveness info would be published in some kind of technical journal that good doctors would read up on when deciding what to prescribe. It would be part of their job and ongoing education.

This being an imperfect world, we have developed an "unsales" pitch, in which a sales team, which may be funded by the state of Pennsylvania, and working with Harvard University, goes around to doctors offices with the same sort of slick brochures that the giant pharmecutical companies use, and tries to get them to consider generic drugs, or to make decisions based on grounded scientific knowlege instead of company marketing.

The effort comes as states and employers are reeling from ever increasing bills for prescription drugs. Pennsylvania alone spends about 3 billion dollars on drugs for state employees, Medicaid, and drug assistance programs. The "unsales" pitch is both good news and bad news. The good news is that it is trying to reverse a really bad trend of marketing pumping up the costs of health care. The bad news is that now the people have to pay for both the private marketing, and the public costs of the "unsales" marketing. So in the short term it is just costing everyone even more. The long term reasonable and logical solution would be to outlaw private advertising of drugs and health care items, and have decisions based on scientifically proven public info.

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Steve Gallagher
Maple Corner, Vermont, USA
www.govern.us

am responding so that you won't feel unappreciated: I hate it when I write an eloquent thought and no one notices.... but I am tired at the moment and the whole topic of health care is quite debilitating (makes my B.P. go up dramaticly) People are too young on this site to actually care about it so the subject is consigned to the basement.

The drugs companies are basically holding the world to ransom charging inflated prices for life saving drugs, this came to a head when (I think it was) South Africa could no longer afford anti AIDS drugs and got them cheaper from India.
India has an industry making copies of drugs for less than half the price of the major companies and they sell them to countries that cannot afford the so called "legal" prices. All power to them (I know that the companies did all the research etc but serves them right for trying to make criminally huge profits)

I agree. It's really stupid to advertise drugs on television that only doctor's can prescribe anyway. Doctor's can buy subscriptions. They don't need the stupid industry stuffing ads down all our throats.

I think it would be best to outlaw the highly expensive ways of advertising. All the doctor's need is a subscription. If you assert that is the major problem with the costs of drugs, I'm glad it's not something more complicated. There's also a problem with drug abuse that I think raises the cost. A lot of times a new drug comes out that is better than all the ones before it. However, people can figure out how to abuse the drug and the FDA has to take it off the market (Sudafed anyone?). This puts a strain on the market because the suppliers go back to the previous number. I guess this would better be classified as Price stagnation. It's a guess. I could be wrong.