Frank Titus Avignone IV

To educate or to sell more medications that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer minor aches and pain or pay outrageous sums of money for drugs you may not need or to take up arms against a sea of adipose tissue and bad habits.

Okay, so now I have had my fun and license with Shakespeare but the message is no less important than Hamlet struggling with his own mortality. Drug companies now spend more on advertising and marketing than on research and development.

A study by New York University performed through empirical methods in 2004 placed pharmaceutical industry marketing and advertisement spending north of 24% of every dollar earned versus 13% for research and development. Domestic drug sales alone attributed for almost a quarter of a trillion dollars in sales, which means the pharmaceutical companies are getting a pretty decent, return on their marketing investment.

Add to this disturbing fact that the Institutes of Medicines reported earlier in the decade that three quarters of a million people die from medical errors with almost a quarter of those deaths directly attributable to prescription drug errors.

That said; don’t fault the Pharmaceutical industry for some of the most effective sales and marketing the world has ever known. Aches and pains that a just a couple of decades ago would be considered part of living are now banished by simply taking a pill.

Prescription drugs typically do not cure diseases or conditions, they merely mute the symptoms. As a society we have developed an attitude of entitlement and the pharmaceutical companies are simply exploiting our intolerance and our need for vanity. The direct to consumer marketing campaigns of the drug companies achieve exactly what they are designed to do, appeal to our need to be younger, stronger, more pain free, and more sexually active.

Ultimately it’s buyers beware, and this author certainly believes that more than one source of information is required to make any buying decision when it comes to pharmaceuticals.

Personally, my life was improved immensely by a Cox-2 inhibitor known as Vioxx pulled from the market after it was blamed for an inordinate amount of cardiac deaths. Notwithstanding some of the data presented was suspect, many Vioxx competitors still have their drugs on the market.

The bottom line is that the pharmaceutical companies need to realign some of their marketing priorities. Perhaps we can require pharmaceutical companies to advertise health and wellness alongside ads for prescription drugs (which many of them do).

Do you think prescription drug advertising unfairly manipulates the buying public?

Photograph Credit:
Sabrina Segal