Informing people that they’re sick and need medication is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Let’s see Pharma Industry Insights through the Eyes of Healthcare Workers.
The year 2015 saw Big Pharma release a record-breaking $5.4 billion in Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) advertisements According to Kantar Media. It paid off to Big Pharma. In the identical year, Americans paid a staggering $457 billion for prescription medicines. The U.S. and New Zealand are the only two countries in which DTC can be legal. Americans also spend more on medications and other devices than any other nation.
The majority of these advertisements are seen on television at an average of 80 adverts per hour programming as per Nielsen. Behind the drug and device advertisements that dominate radio, TV, and digital media, are hidden costs and disastrous negative side effects that manufacturers don’t announce, and critics claim advertisements increase prices for drugs and undermine the relationship between doctor and patient.
How are generics supposed to work?
In 1984, the Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act provided pharmaceutical companies with exclusive protections to develop new drugs. If they could bring a novel drug to market it was protected by patents to effectively control the market. This was the benefit of taking on the risky and the high cost of developing innovative drugs.
However, once the patent and the exclusive control over the market expires, the law encouraged competition for the benefit of consumers. Any pharmaceutical company could make non-brand-name versions of the same medication, referred to as “generics.” And for the time it worked.
The methods that companies can stop generics
One of the ways that brand drug makers can thwart competitors is straightforward which is cash. In what is known as ” pay for delay” agreements the brand drug company simply pays a generic firm not to release a different version of the drug. According to the Federal Trade Commission estimates these agreements will cost U.S. consumers and taxpayers $3.5 billion in additional prices for drugs every year.
False claims
“57% of the most emphasized claims in the drug adverts covered were ‘potentially misleading.”
The study, titled ‘Content Analysis of Misleading and False claims in TV Advertising to Prescription and non-prescription drugs, looked with an archive of Vanderbilt Television News Archive to examine the advertisements for pharmaceuticals that aired alongside the newscasts at night along the US east coast between 2008 and 2010 in search of false or possibly misleading claims.
The results are astonishing. The study’s most important finding was that 57 percent of the most emphasized claims in both prescription and non-prescription advertisements for drugs were “potentially misleading. An additional 10% were clearly in error or unsubstantiated with the publicly available evidence. The doublespeak may be common in the world of advertising but from a scientific standpoint, it’s extremely worrying. Contacting experts can help you know more about your queries.