Today's news contained a brief story about a new $20 million direct to consumer advertising campaign involving Yaz, a popular oral contraceptive.
Yaz is a good product with a unique progestin. It has been heavily promoted and I wondered what more Bayer could possibly have to say about it. Well, it seems they've said too much and the FDA wants Bayer to take some of it back.
This is probably an especially bitter pill for Bayer because Yaz's parent compound — Yasmin — is now available as a lower cost generic with similar benefits.
You can't watch TV for a half hour or flip through 10 pages of a magazine without being exposed to drug advertising. The US has allowed consumer drug advertising since 1996 (only New Zealand joins us in this practice). In 2007, pharmaceutical companies spent over 5 billion dollars on consumer ads in the US.
Critics of consumer drug ads say they appeal to emotions, overstate drug benefits and understate side effects. It is the new drugs that are most heavily advertised, before their safety profiles are fully understood.
And some critics say these ads are "medicalizing" the human conditon, suggesting there is a pill for every problem.
A 2004 study involving Colorado physicians reported most viewed consumer drug ads negatively because they gave no information on cost or alternative treatments and downplayed adverse effects.
Patients requesting a specific medication frequently require a longer clinic visit and may be dissatisfied if they do not get the requested drug, even if there are good reasons for not prescribing it.
Proponents of consumer drug advertising say the ads are educational. A few years ago, an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine argued most ads provide the name and symptoms of a medical problem and little more.
The editorial quotes Canadian economist Stephen Leacock who said advertising is "the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it."
Prescription drug advertising in the US rose from $11.4 billion in 1996 to $29.9 billion in 2005. Pharmaceutical companies spend 6 times more money advertising to physicians than to consumers, though consumer advertising is growing more rapidly.
Both patients and physicians do need to be educated about new drugs and medical devices, but that education should not come mainly from the company selling the product. The medical community is actively discussing how physicians can best receive objective information about new products.
We'd all be better off if excessive promotional costs did not add to the price of new prescription medications. And every one of us can think of better ways to spend Bayer's $20 million actually delivering medical care.
