About Those Annoying Drug Ads

From RedNova News: "Drug Ads Pitched to Consumers Could Be Limited"--

A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel's recommendation to ban drug makers from marketing certain pain medicines directly to consumers could be the first step toward limiting a lucrative privilege the government granted the drug industry eight years ago.

The FDA's 1997 decision to make it easier drug companies to tailor commercials for the general public opened up the advertising floodgates--especially on nightly television--and is now blamed, in part, for skyrocketing health-care costs during the past several years.

In a stingy rebuke, advisors to the FDA last week asked the agency to ban direct-to-consumer ads for Cox-2 drugs, which had been among the top promoted drugs in the U.S. before Merck & Co. pulled Vioxx from the market Sept. 30 and Pfizer Inc. suspended ads for Celebrex in December. The drug makers' decisions came in the wake of revelations about increased risks for heart attack and stroke for both drugs.

--Posted by Illinois personal injury attorney T. Evan Schaeffer of Schaeffer & Lamere, P.C.

Comments

[Andrew Spark]

years I have been angry at the way medicine is practiced in this country. Medicine has become a racket and is no longer about healing as much as it is about being a business and about profit. It has become this way, because more people know what’s going on under the hood of their cars than what is going on in their own bodies. We’ve ceased to take responsibility for our own health…yeah, yeah - you’re on the latest diet craze, you exercise and don’t smoke…but tomorrow you’re jogging down the street and drop dead of a heart attack. Why? Because you missed the signs, and you missed it because you didn’t know what the signs were. You don’t pay attention to your body until it screams at you with pain.