Drug TV ads troubling, but ads for doctors even more disturbing Posted by mitcka at 04/06/05 09:46 AM

Our new song “The Drugs I Need,” a parody of prescription drug ads we see on TV, seems to have touched a nerve. But doctors are getting a lot of advertising too, and a new study finds that these ads make a lot of unsupported claims.

The song has now been viewed more than a million times and downloaded into ipods and computers across the country. Why? Maybe because we all feel a little uncomfortable when we watch T.V. drug ads and wonder if the drug companies really think we are that shallow. And yet, is that the drug I need? Perhaps I need to ask my doctor!

Doctors are getting a lot of advertising too, and its not much better than the TV ads for the rest of us. In February, the Canadian Medical Association Journal published a detailed analysis of 438 different drug ads found in ten American medical journals. Some highlights:

Of the 438 ads in the database, 126 (29%) offered no references in support of their claims.

Of the 294 pharmaceutical ad references citing original research, 58% indicated that the research was sponsored by or had authors affiliated with the product’s manufacturer, 19% stated funding by a government or charitable organization and the remainder (23%) had no statement regarding funding or specifically reported no funding.

For some reason, this brand new study analyzed ads from 1999, but I’m guessing that drug ads haven’t changed much, and there are certainly a lot of them still printed in medical journals. These ads may provide remarkably little evidence in support of their claims even though their audience is physicians. And when they do, the evidence may be its own company sponsored research.

But there’s more!

More than half of the drug ads cite unpublished data to support their claims. When researchers sent 88 requests asking for the data to back up these ads, the companies replied to only 42% of the requests, and about half of the responses “were letters stating that the data on file would not be provided because it was proprietary (17) or because of company policy (2).” Drug companies sent back data for only 18 of the 88 requests, and in three of these cases the drug company indicated that some data had been withheld as proprietary.

So, if you are watching a drug ad, and you want to ask your doctor about it—make sure that your doctor has checked out the research behind the drug company’s claims, if that’s even possible!

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