Does Drug Marketing Increase the Risk of Illness?

A recent news release from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey stated that the more widely drug companies market a drug, the less many users of the drug tend to benefit from its use and the more likely they are harmed by it. So says a new report from researchers Donald Light, PhD of the UMDNJ-School of Osteopathic Medicine and Howard Brody, MD of the University of Texas Medical Branch. They call their finding the Inverse Benefit Law and described it in a paper published online in the American Journal of Public Health.

Dr. Light is quoted as saying "The Inverse Benefit Law means that the more widely a drug is marketed, the more diluted becomes its effectiveness, but the more people are exposed to its harmful side effects. The Inverse Benefit Law applies to most drugs advertised on television or in other mass media."

The authors emphaized that the pharmaceutical industry does not set out to market bad drugs that could cause public harm, saying "The marketing arm then turns those good drugs into bad drugs, in effect, by extending their use beyond proper evidence." The authors believe that patients' health can be improved by restricting promotion of medications for unapproved uses as well as mass direct-to-consumer advertising.

Allow us to introduce a few relevant points to these findings:

1. Educated patients make for better patients. When patients understand more about their own health and diseases, they can ask better questions and make more informed choices about their care. They also are often more compliant and adhere to treatment regimens when they understand them at a more educated level. Ethical direct-to-consumer educational campaigns do serve a critical function, raising awareness of disease and treatment options. The importance of this type of consumer education is well documented, and the key word here is ETHICAL.

2. The FDA's DDMAC reviews DTC advertising and promotions and ethical advertising will not permit the promotion of a medication for unapprove uses. Professional marketing and advertising materials are also held to this rigorous standard, and ethical individuals both at the pharma companies themselves and their advertising, marketing, and PR agencies adhere to these guidelines and standards. Again, the key word here is ETHICAL.

3. Any physician who "caves in" and gives a patient a drug just because he or she asks for it (because the patient saw it on a TV commercial) really needs to stop and think about that decision. Who's the professional in that exam room? We have seen cases of over-prescribing of antibiotics, for example, for viral colds because patients believe they need an antibiotic and the doctors think they'll "disappoint" the patient if they don't write the script. In these case, who is at fault -- the DTC ad the patient brought into the exam room or the doctor? Ethical physicians will not surrender their professionalism to an ad torn from the pages of a magazine or a print-out from the Internet. Again, the key word is ETHICAL.

Protecting the public from "bad medicine" -- whether that bad medicine comes from a poorly designed clinical trial, data misinterpretation, poorly educated patients, unprofessional doctors, or unbalanced and unethical pharmaceutical marketing, including DTC -- is critically important. And unethical behavior and communications need to be called out, which these authors have done. Who could disagree with that?

We'd go one step further and point to the reams of inaccurate information posted on the Internet and other sources of Social Media related to healthcare. Patients today are flooded with information -- both good and bad -- and really do need help in sorting it all out.

This is why we feel fair balance needs to be introduced into this discussion -- there are ethical pharmaceutical companies with ethical marketing departments and equally ethical advertising/PR/medical education/marketing agency partners who adhere to guidelines and ensure they are on the "right side of the angels" as part of promoting better healthcare. And there is a role for the pharmaceutical industry and its partners to help patients "sort it all out" and become healthier healthcare consumers. This education role is one that industry can play ethically and fairly balanced, and often does, even partnering with government/healthcare governing bodies to help build public awareness of health issues. We'd like to see industry continue to rise to this challenge and hold itself to high ethical standards in promotion so that studies like the one Drs. Light and Brody conducted become obsolete and patients benefit from better healthcare all around.