Should Drug Companies Be Advertising to Consumers?(nytimes.com)
nytimes.com
Should Drug Companies Be Advertising to Consumers?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/health/drug-advertisements-consumers.html
7 comments
On one hand:
If it's not legal for me to buy something then why do I see ads for it? Prescription drugs and products for children like toy and food ads during kid's shows fall in this category.
On the other hand:
- Not everyone has a doctor that gives them more than 3-4 minutes during a visit. So, while this is a separate issue that drug ads aren't designed to solve, there are positive effects:
-- Drug ads may make you aware of a treatment you didn't know about before.
-- Drug ads are a good opportunity for companies to inform of the side effects of drugs.
And:
- The "placebo effect" may contribute to a success of a drug. Maybe drug ads help start this psychological process through the visuals in their ads.
Regarding the content of most pharmaceutical ads, I'd say they don't really explicitly mislead and they do their best to present side effects and such in the timeframe of the commercial. I haven't seen any that are more annoying or untruthful than other typical ads.
I associate negative thoughts with them not because of the content or purpose of the ads, but because the ads seem to appear where older people are believed to be, and that means someone has put you into an old-person bucket.
If it's not legal for me to buy something then why do I see ads for it? Prescription drugs and products for children like toy and food ads during kid's shows fall in this category.
On the other hand:
- Not everyone has a doctor that gives them more than 3-4 minutes during a visit. So, while this is a separate issue that drug ads aren't designed to solve, there are positive effects:
-- Drug ads may make you aware of a treatment you didn't know about before.
-- Drug ads are a good opportunity for companies to inform of the side effects of drugs.
And:
- The "placebo effect" may contribute to a success of a drug. Maybe drug ads help start this psychological process through the visuals in their ads.
Regarding the content of most pharmaceutical ads, I'd say they don't really explicitly mislead and they do their best to present side effects and such in the timeframe of the commercial. I haven't seen any that are more annoying or untruthful than other typical ads.
I associate negative thoughts with them not because of the content or purpose of the ads, but because the ads seem to appear where older people are believed to be, and that means someone has put you into an old-person bucket.
This is another of those "no idea how to fix it says only country where it's a problem" type issues.
The only two countries where direct-to-consumer prescription advertising is legal are the US and New Zealand, and my belief/understanding from my time living in Australia was that informal or other trade agreement negotiation pressure from the US was at least one of the reasons for that.
> The "placebo effect" may contribute to a success of a drug. Maybe drug ads help start this psychological process through the visuals in their ads.
So in theory, US responses to medications should be notably better than in other countries, right?
> I'd say they don't really explicitly mislead
I'd disagree - in the realm of mental health drugs, many ads have such vague handwaving as to be useless (where to me is that the misleading intent is to get you asking your doctor about a specific drug regardless of what's going on) - "Do you have trouble starting your day? Cymbalta could help! Ask your doctor! Eli Lilly can help with the cost!"
The only two countries where direct-to-consumer prescription advertising is legal are the US and New Zealand, and my belief/understanding from my time living in Australia was that informal or other trade agreement negotiation pressure from the US was at least one of the reasons for that.
> The "placebo effect" may contribute to a success of a drug. Maybe drug ads help start this psychological process through the visuals in their ads.
So in theory, US responses to medications should be notably better than in other countries, right?
> I'd say they don't really explicitly mislead
I'd disagree - in the realm of mental health drugs, many ads have such vague handwaving as to be useless (where to me is that the misleading intent is to get you asking your doctor about a specific drug regardless of what's going on) - "Do you have trouble starting your day? Cymbalta could help! Ask your doctor! Eli Lilly can help with the cost!"
No.
For fun, when a drug ad comes on I often search <drug name> + “price”. A thousand dollars a month? No wonder you can afford all these ads.
Betteridge's law. Ethics and morality are secondary to predatory money, money, money extraction from docile and under-protected American consumers subsidizing the rest of the world.
Disappointing article. On one hand, we have direct costs and over prescription. On the other hand, we have folks being educated that (a) they have a condition they should speak to their doctor about or (b) a condition they knew they had had a new treatment option. To answer the headline question you need to at least attempt to measure each of those.
Basically the answer is no & the experiment has been a disaster.