Ask your doctor if dancing drug ads are right for you [View all]

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Shouldn’t drug companies be spending more money on research — and cheaper drugs — than advertising?

By Tom Burke / Herald Columnist

I know man is a fragile creature; not as strong as the great apes; not as sharp-eyed as the eagle, as thick-skinned as the rhino, or as agile as the monkey.

And if anyone needs proof of our fragility, tune into Fox or MSNBC or most any TV channel and tally up all the advertising describing, in grim detail, how vulnerable we are to a plethora of maladies; as Big Pharma unleashes huge, all-pervasive, overwhelming volumes of “disease” advertising, running incessantly it seems, across the bandwidth.

Now I’m not trying to minimize the pain or tragedy suffered by anyone or the relief these medicines affect. But my propriety has been stretched thin by the huge budgets (way north of $6 billion) spent on direct-to-consumer ads trying to convince patients … to convince their doctors …to prescribe this or that treatment.

And I am more than mystified why Big Pharma has targeted so many [to me at least] relatively-obscure ailments with what Harvard Medical School identifies as basically second-rate drugs. I’m sure all the maladies are real, but until the advertising began I’d never heard of many of them (and I lived with a health care-professional for 52 years).

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/burke-ask-your-doctor-if-dancing-drug-ads-are-right-for-you/