Ruken
March 24, 2017, 7:30pm
41
Mama_Zappa:
Well, if the drug companies did not feel that the advertising budget was, in fact, driving up sales, they wouldn’t continue to do it. Certainly the amount of time and effort spent giving promotional materials and samples to doctors seems to work - if there are 12 different drugs to treat a condition, and the doc has just heard a sales pitch for brand A, that may well be the one he thinks of first off when prescribing for a patient. ESPECIALLY if he has samples of it on hand.
**I would love to see if there are studies showing whether direct-to-consumer advertising did in fact influence a doctor to prescribe A versus B. **
It may even be less straightforward and obvious a connection. I mean, I have asthma, and I’m not going to go to the doctor and say “gimme Breo” (or whatever it was I saw on TV). But it might make me more willing to try Breo if the doctor suggested it - since I was already “familiar” with it by seeing it on TV.
Or the advertisement for RLS medication (Requip, when it was first approved for RLS) certainly caused some people to go “aha, I recognize that!” and bring it up with the doctor - whereas beforehand, the patient thought he or she was just imagining these weird syptoms. So an RLSer goes to the doc, describes the symptoms; the doc has just heard of this “new” drug, and prescribes it. I specifically use RLS as an example because it is a condition that so many doctors are unfamiliar with, and/or have no idea of appropriate treatment.
Bolding mine. I would expect so, but a cursory check didn’t find anything. There are a bunch of papers from around 2004 due to some FDA surveys from back then, but I’m not digging up anything good yet.
As you mention, in addition to A vs B, there’s the matter of A vs nothing. Which is more significant, I can’t say.