A handful of professors scoured the ads that ran during a month’s worth of prime-time and evening-newshour television and saw this:

1 - The ads “provide limited information about the causes of a disease or who may be at risk;
2 - The ads show people who’ve lost control of their lives without help from medicines;
3 - The ads “minimize” the virtues of better health through lifestyle changes.

The study, which appears in The Annals of Family Medicine, reaches this conclusion: DTC ads have “limited” educational value and may “oversell” the benefits of drugs in way that may conflict with promoting health.

“The character is shown before with their life out of control. They can’t work. They can’t go hiking. Then after taking the prescription drug, they’re better,” says Dominick Frosch of the University of California at Los Angeles department of medicine, the study’s lead author, told The Star-Ledger of New Jersey. “The benefits of prescription drugs are not that black and white. You don’t go from being unwell to being well just like that.”

Phrma must be fuming, because the authors also criticize the trade group’s ad guidelines for being vague and unenforceable.

But will this study really change anything? To be sure, it will become a useful tool for industry critics. Beyond that, it will take a legislative push. Is anyone in Congress listening? Stay tuned. Maybe a news clip on the topic will appear between a couple of those ads.

[tags]Congress, DTC Ads; Phrma[/tags]