Do you honestly fail to appreciate the difference between providing an incentive to try to get people voluntarily to engage in behavior you want to encourage and using the force of law to compel them to do so?
It is the difference between offering a reward to help find your lost dog and telling your neighbors you’re going to commandeer their cars if they don’t find your dog by Friday.
I guess you were unaware of the fact that R&D is at an all-time low, that spending on advertising is still a bigger part of the budgets (even if that is also shrinking), and Obama last year decided to subsidize R&D to the tune of a billion dollars.
Well, my last post gave you citations. Now you are aware.
So in your blathering two posts, is it your contention that there is no problem or a better way to solve the problem?
If it’s the former, thanks for stopping by. I disagree. I think it is a problem.
If it’s the latter, I welcome your own ideas to help solve it. I never said mine were the best and welcome new ones.
Unless you think that would mean you were “bitching and moaning online,” in which case you’re pretty much just trolling which I believe is against the rules of this forum.
Why is it that the first and only idea that occurred to you was that the government should make other people work on things you perceive to be a problem?
Why did it not occur to you to say, “There’s work to be done. I’ll invest in R&D!” or “This is a big problem. I’ll study pharmacology!”?
Too busy with your own ish and you’ve got other ideas for your own cash?
I’m always suspicious of those who know how to spend other people’s money but who are too sensitive to put some of their own skin in the game.
The force of law already dictates advertising for tobacco and alcohol. What’s the problem with doing so in this industry?
The law isn’t forcing anyone to do anything; it would tell a company not to advertise certain ways, like it already does in the examples I provided (and probably more I am not aware of).
Except that the government is not forcing any private citizens to do anything, so your analogy kinda sucks. It is merely regulating advertising.
If we were to attempt to use your analogy, it would be that I am paying for the neighbors to feed their own dog and all of his essential vet visits while the owners are shelling out for expensive grooming so it will easier to be notice the dog while walking down the block.
Well, until you decide: Too many people are getting out of the business of developing drugs because of burdens we’ve imposed on their use of their profits, time to regulate!
When it comes to deciding whether to leave vital drug developers dissatisfied or to leave internet grievance-bearers dissatisfied, I know which group I privilege every single time.
Because the government is already involved with the healthcare and pharmecutical industries and they aren’t getting out any time soon.
I still don’t see any ideas from you aside from asking me to get to change my career. :rolleyes: As someone who purchases prescription and OTC medications from time to time, I am already involved. And as a tax payer whose taxes go to the pharmaceutical companies, I am already involved.
So you’re saying there is no problem? Or you have no solution to the problem? Which one?
Well Heaven forfend this big problem should put you out! Aren’t there other people we can have the government force them to work on this issue in a manner that meets with your satisfaction?
So very true. Haven’t you done enough!?! I mean, you bought some Tylenol on occasion after all. That’s a big fuckin’ deal!
Alas, I predict a glut in supply within the internet complaining market this quarter.
Your taxes go to national research institutes which perform basic science. The work of expanding that basic science into applied science and commercializing those results (developing drugs, clearing regulatory burdens, establishing distribution channels, and raising consumer awareness of the product that the companies would like those consumers to buy and which purchase makes the whole enterprise worth it) is done by the pharmaceutical companies for profit.
Profit: the cash you have left over at the end which you alone get to decide how it’s spent. What doesn’t count as profit? Cash that comes with strings attached.
Bears repeating…
Not really.
But since you think this is some great gotcha-ya, no there’s not a problem.
If President Obama is planning to furnish incentives for drug research, a la the Orphan Drug Act (which, incidentally, is a vital bit of information to have on this topic if you wish to engage in an informed debate, and which you did not know about until right now (maybe we can have the government make other people provide us research summaries too!)), I have no problem with that.
But as it is, your “problem,” to wit, people are spending money on things I don’t want more of and not enough on coming up with thing I want, is not really a problem.
Of course, your rejoinder will be some horseshit about “society’s wants,” all without mentioning the remarkable perfect coincidence of “society’s wants” and your own wants.
Then what I said earlier stands: Thanks for stopping by. I disagree. I think it is a problem.
What is an acceptable amount of a pharmaceutical companies budget to spend on advertising?
Does the advertising budget actually take away from research? i.e. If the pharmaceutical companies didn’t advertise would that money just magically go to research? I bet it wouldn’t.
How much do new vaccines cost these days? HPV is about $390 for the three shots you need. Any idea how much a polio vaccine cost in 1955-57?
I agree that I shouldn’t be telling my doctor what to prescribe for me. However, I see nothing wrong with finding out about a drug and talking to my doctor about it. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with informing us lay people about what kind of medication is available especially if its new. Knowledge isn’t a bad thing.
There seems to be a very popular notion on the SDMB that because the government regulates some things a certain way that this means the government is free to regulate anything any way they see fit. I might accept that the government can regulate the food industry by requiring them to provide nutritional information or prevent pharmaceutical companies from lying about what their medicines do. This doesn’t mean I automatically accept that the government can regulate every industry in anyway they like. So you’re not really making an argument for why the government should be able to regulate pharmaceutical companies in the way you wish them regulated.
Honestly, I don’t see a huge problem with drug advertisements.
I didn’t say the research is evil (even though it is but to a lesser extent), its the entire industry. I’ll give you a few examples:
1: Drug advertisers KNOW that people will get their drugs without a prescription when they hear about it in ads. (which results in a lot of medically unsafe use) but more profit for them yaY!
2: Drug companies produce and sell new drugs under these criteria: a) drug is better than a placebo in 1 clinical trial (doesn’t matter how many they did total). b) won’t kill people immediately or cause other litigation inducing side effects c) mild side effects are good, convinces people the drug is working. d) the real test to see how much damage it will do is when the drug goes live. e) preferred drugs are drugs that can be prescribed endlessly, especially wanted are drugs that cause addiction/dependence on way or another.
3: Drug companies lobby doctors to prescribe their new drugs. Endless free events, dinners, shows, vacations, the most attractive sales representatives you can imagine at every doctor’s office every single day they’re open for business.
4: drug companies are pioneers in advanced advertizing techniques like news segments produced to look real set between breaks of actual news shows, they also buy themselves something else from media when they advertise with them: Silence about anything bad out there about their drugs or business practices generally.
Direct-to-consumer advertising is illegal in almost all Western countries, the U.S. and New Zealand being the only exceptions, and has been since the 1940s. It was banned in the U.S. as well, but the field opened up in 1985 after some sort of FDA kerfuffle that I really don’t understand. FDA still has strict rules for content, and PhRMA has some voluntary guidelines that have kept Congress from restoring the ban, but I, too, would like to see the DTCA genie back in its bottle.
As would I. Mainly, I confess, because the ads are skevy and deliberately try to make us feel like we have some disease or condition that can be fixed with a pill. The ads work by spreading fear rather than information. The drugs that are being advertised are for the most part regulated and and only available by prescription but the clear intent if for us to badger our doctors. Doctors should be making drug choices based on the the available evidence for that drug’s ability to treat whatever the doctor has found in a patient, not based on what a patient thinks he remembers an ad saying about his condition or on how hot the pharm rep was. If we are going to let drug companies mislead the public with their ads then maybe we should just deregulate the whole industry. Then the drug companies can cut out the pesky middle man and sell their snake oil directly to the customers.
Where’s the part where he says anything about advertising? Your “pet peeve” is that you don’t like their advertising.
Everyone wishes there were more and better drugs to fight diseases. And, like I said above, public funding and private funding can be two separate efforts. Your cite proves what I’ve been saying.
Most of the truly innovative research isn’t done by the pharmceutical companies. It’s done by university research centers and the taxpayer funded National Institutes of Health. These organizations ( under a provision of the 1980 Bayh-Doyle Act ) are allowed to sell or license their discoveries to the pharmaceutical companies at a profit. The pharmaceutical companies will also sometimes fund these scientists.
Of course, Bayh-Doyle also had a provision requiring that the public have reasonable access to the innovations discovered by taxpayer funded research institutes but that is largely ignored so consumers without access to a way to pay the hundreds of thousands of dollars that a chemotherapy drug discovered with taxpayer money costs is SOL.
Most of the in-house pharma research is geared towards things like figuring out how to strip an inactive molecule off a drug with an expiring patent in order to relicense it with a new name.
They are banned with good reason. Pretty much every other Western nation has realized that the vast majority of their citizens are simply unable to understand the complex interactions that these drugs have on their bodies. Sensibly, they restrict such advertising to doctors and medical professionals who DO hopefully understand, and will prescribe accordingly. That is sort of the whole point of the prescription system. The DTCA format is designed for nothing more than an end run around the doctors to get the patients to annoy their care providers, and create as much hypochondria as possible.