Medical Ethics - Advertising
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Medical Ethics - Advertising
General Information
NEWS:
Access to Drug Samples May Influence Resident Physician Prescribing
Advertisements highlight MSD's inappropriate hospitality
Bayer’s Duplicity on Drug Safety " … the circumstances suggest that Bayer sought to hide the results of a contractor’s study until some way could be found to discount them. It came clean only when forced to by a whistleblower. The drug is Trasylol, which has long been used in heart surgery to reduce blood loss and the need for transfusions. Although extensive data seemed to document the drug’s effectiveness and safety, two studies published this year found that it increased the risk of kidney failure, heart attack and stroke. "
Cancer Drug Ads Put Caveats in Fine Print " 'Direct-to-consumer advertising of oncology medications typically focuses on the drugs' benefits, as would be expected, but it does so in a manner that might lead some cancer patients to not appreciate equally the drugs' potential side effects and risks,' study author Dr. Gregory Abel, of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said in a prepared statement. 'Oncology providers should be aware of these advertisement characteristics, as they may influence patients' perceptions of and requests for these medications.' "
Charities Tied to Doctors Get Drug Industry Gifts "As she presented research results indicating that a new medical device was "an important breakthrough," the doctor's enthusiasm was clear. Less evident were some of the financial links between the researchers and the device's maker."
Cochrane reviews compared with industry-supported meta-analyses and other meta-analyses of the same drugs: systematic review (BMJ 2006) BMJ review statement: "Of seven industry-supported reviews, all recommended the experimental drug without reservation, whilst none of the corresponding Cochrane reviews reached the same conclusion. Six of the eight Cochrane reviews analysed had reservations about the quality or relevance of the trials or their findings and two of them noted that the effect decreased with increasing number of patients in the trial. Seven mentioned higher cost of the experimental drug as a problem. In contrast, none of the industry-supported reviews mentioned higher cost as a problem, and two claimed that the experimental drug was cost-effective."
Commercial influence and the content of medical journals "How confident should we be in the objectivity of medical journals? Do commercial biases play a part in determining what appears in print? Authors of articles in medical journals may be affected by commercial bias. Whether this same concern applies to the editors and owners of journals has rarely been critically examined.1 2 Our article explores the reasons for concern."
Conflicts of interest are common at FDA
Debate Simmers Over Popular Antidepressant Ad Claims
Distance Sought Between Doctors and Drug Industry
Doctor charged with criminal conflict of interest "Federal prosecutors on Monday charged a leading government Alzheimer’s researcher with engaging in a criminal conflict of interest by earning $285,000 in private consulting fees from a pharmaceutical giant. In a rare criminal case against a government scientist, the National Institutes of Health’s Dr. Trey Sunderland was accused of performing consulting work for Pfizer Inc. that improperly overlapped with his government duties."
Donations tie drug firms and nonprofits "The American Diabetes Association, a leading patient health group, privately enlisted an Eli Lilly & Co. executive to chart its growth strategy and write its slogan. The National Alliance on Mental Illness, an outspoken patient advocate, lobbies for treatment programs that also benefit its drug-company donors. The National Gaucher Foundation, a supporter of people suffering from a horrific rare disease, gets nearly all its revenue from one drugmaker, Genzyme Corp. Although patients seldom know it, many patient groups and drug companies maintain close, multimillion-dollar relationships while disclosing limited or no details about the ties. At a time when people are making more of their own health-care decisions, such coziness raises questions about the impartiality of groups that patients trust for unbiased information. It also poses a challenge for groups trying to hold patients' trust and still raise money to serve them. An Inquirer examination of six groups, each a leading advocate for patients in a disease area, found that the groups rarely disclose such ties when commenting or lobbying about donors' drugs. They also tend to be slower to publicize treatment problems than breakthroughs. And few openly questioned drug prices."
Eli Lilly Said to Play Down Risk of Top Pill "The drug maker Eli Lilly has engaged in a decade-long effort to play down the health risks of Zyprexa, its best-selling medication for schizophrenia, according to hundreds of internal Lilly documents and e-mail messages among top company managers. James B. Gottstein, a lawyer who represents the mentally ill, said the documents about Zyprexa’s side effects raised public health issues. The documents, given to The Times by a lawyer representing mentally ill patients, show that Lilly executives kept important information from doctors about Zyprexa’s links to obesity and its tendency to raise blood sugar — both known risk factors for diabetes. Lilly’s own published data, which it told its sales representatives to play down in conversations with doctors, has shown that 30 percent of patients taking Zyprexa gain 22 pounds or more after a year on the drug, and some patients have reported gaining 100 pounds or more."
Eliminating barriers to DTC advertising for OTCs and natural health products.
For-Profit Funding May Bias Clinical Trials "In a revealing look at the impact of funding on medical research, a new study found that clinical trials funded by drug companies and other for-profit entities were more likely to report positive findings than similar trials funded by nonprofit groups."
Free drug samples influence prescribing, say one in three doctors
Hospital boards too closely tied to industry: Panels that oversee experiments tainted by conflicts of interest, study finds "A survey of hospital review boards that watchdog experiments on patients shows that one in three members takes money from companies that make drugs and medical devices that come under study. What’s more, many of those with conflicts rarely or never disclose their financial ties, researchers found. … The question: Do medical researchers always act in the best interest of science — or patients — if they are also getting royalties, consulting fees or other benefits from the makers of the products being tested?"
Hospitals: Is the Price Right?
Many Researchers Break the Rules: Study
NEJM "failed its readers" by delay in publishing its concerns about VIGOR trial
NIH Researcher Pleads Guilty to Conflict of Interest "National Institute of Mental Health scientist Trey Sunderland pled guilty today to violating conflict-of-interest rules when he accepted nearly $300,000 for drug company consulting services--without getting required approval from his superiors or disclosing the income to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) …"
Nutrition Journal Hid Contributors' Ties to Food Industry "A nutrition journal published by the American College of Nutrition failed to tell readers that a special supplement on salt intake was written and edited by consultants to the salt industry. The editors also failed to inform the National Library of Medicine (NLM), which included the abstracts from the supplement in MEDLINE. NLM rules state MEDLINE will not carry abstracts from sponsored supplements unless conflict-of-interest disclosure statements are prominently featured in the supplement."
Our view: Gifts from drugmakers damage doctors' integrity
Researchers Call for Ban on Pharma Ads in Medical Journals
Risky Rx: Drug maker's secret strategies: ‘Disturbing’ glimpse into how marketing dupes doctors — and patients "Reliable estimates put the drug industry’s expenditure on promotion to doctors at $18.5 billion — that's about $30,000 a year for every physician in the U.S. Companies conceal the specifics of those efforts with a jealousy worthy of a state secret."
Seducing the Medical Profession
Spending to death: How much is living worth?
States want info about drugmakers' gifts to doctors
Study Finds a Link of Drug Makers to Psychiatrists "More than half the psychiatrists who took part in developing a widely used diagnostic manual for mental disorders had financial ties to drug companies before or after the manual was published, public health researchers reported yesterday. . n recent years, critics have said that the manual has become too expansive, including diagnoses, like social phobia, that they say appear tailor-made to create a market for antidepressants or other drugs."
The impact of advertising prescription medicines directly to consumers in New Zealand: lessons for Australia "In summary, what both New Zealand and Australia need is greater and more accessible independent consumer health information, not impossible to regulate, industry-sponsored direct-to-consumer advertising."
Top mental health guide questioned "The study is the first to document extensive monetary connections between drug companies, psychiatrists and other scientists responsible for the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The DSM, as it's commonly called, defines all the mental illnesses recognized by psychiatry and outlines the criteria used to determine whether a person has one of these conditions. Medical professionals refer to it as the "bible of mental health" in the U.S. The current version, the DSM-IV, was published in 1994 and modified in 2000. The manual is of enormous importance to pharmaceutical firms, as the Food and Drug Administration will not approve a drug to treat a mental illness unless the condition is in the DSM. Drug companies then can market approved medications to physicians and consumers."
US study finds data changes in drug companies' brochures
When medical reality doesn't match the spin
Whistle-Blower Suit Says Device Maker Generously Rewards Doctors
ARTICLES:
How NICE may be outflanked "NICE appraises technologies that are available to the NHS and recommends whether they should be used unreservedly, with restrictions, or not at all.2 Part of its remit is to ensure equity, but equity is not in everyone's interests. Here, we consider how individuals or groups with specific interests may seek to outflank NICE. . "
SSRI ads questioned. " Claims in drug monographs and advertising that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants work by normalizing serotonin levels are not based on scientific evidence and should be prohibited, says a leading US psychiatrist."
The worst kind of deceit: Fraud by Novartis and Max Foundation targets patients
JOURNAL ARTICLES:
Cholinesterase Inhibitors: Drugs Looking for a Disease? "Drug companies have invested heavily in developing treatments for Alzheimer disease, and then were actively involved in expanding the market to other forms of dementia. In the last decade, donepezil, galantamine, and rivastigmine have been tested not only in patients with Alzheimer disease but also in patients with vascular dementia, dementia with Lewy bodies, dementia associated with Parkinson disease, and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Even when the evidence on the efficacy of these drugs is lacking, or inconclusive, the results are often presented in such a way as to create a false perception of efficacy. For example, about 23 different scales or instruments (on average six per trial) were used, in the trials considered here, as primary or secondary outcome measures. Most of them were not validated for the disease for which the drugs were tested and are not currently used in clinical practice, undermining the translation of these research findings into clinical practice. Moreover, the treatment effect in the trials is usually expressed through the average change from baseline in test scores, without discussing the clinical importance of the usually small effect size observed."
Consultation or corruption? The ethics of signing on to the medical-industrial complex. (J Vasc Surg. 2006)
Excessive and disproportionate advertising in peer-reviewed journals. (Int J Occup Environ Health. 2006)
Giving Legs to Restless Legs: A Case Study of How the Media Helps Make People Sick "Discussions about disease mongering usually focus on the role of pharmaceutical companies-how they promote disease and their products through "disease awareness" campaigns and direct-to-consumer drug advertising, and by funding disease advocacy groups. But diseases also get promoted in another way: through the news media. News reports are a major source of health information for people [3]. Unless journalists approach stories about new diseases skeptically and look out for disease mongering by the pharmaceutical industry, pharmaceutical consultants, and advocacy groups, journalists, too, may end up selling sickness."
Health Industry Practices That Create Conflicts of Interest (JAMA. 2006)
How direct-to-consumer television advertising for osteoarthritis drugs affects physicians' prescribing behavior. (Health Aff (Millwood). 2006) "Concern about the potential pernicious effect of direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertising on physicians' prescribing patterns was heightened with the 2004 withdrawal of Vioxx, a heavily advertised treatment for osteoarthritis. We examine how DTC advertising has affected physicians' prescribing behavior for osteoarthritis patients."
Medicine Goes to School: Teachers as Sickness Brokers for ADHD
Pharmaceutical Marketing and the Invention of the Medical Consumer "It is often said that leading drug companies now spend more on marketing than on research and development [1]. While such contemporary pharmaceutical marketing practices are sometimes believed to be a modern phenomenon, they are in fact a direct continuation of 19th-century patent medicine advertising. "Nostrum-mongers," as the novelist Henry James dubbed them, are noted in the history of advertising as having been the leading spenders on, and foremost originators of, advertising technique [2,3]. Nostrum sellers pioneered print advertising, use of trademarks and distinctive packaging, "pull" or demand-stimulation strategies, and even the design and commissioning of medical almanacs that functioned as vehicles for promotion of disease awareness."
The Latest Mania: Selling Bipolar Disorder
What Are the Public Health Effects of Direct-to-Consumer Drug Advertising? (PLoS Med. 2006) "Background to the debate: Only two industrialized countries, the United States and New Zealand, allow direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription medicines, although New Zealand is planning a ban [1]. The challenge for these governments is ensuring that DTCA is more beneficial than harmful. Proponents of DTCA argue that it helps to inform the public about available treatments and stimulates appropriate use of drugs for high-priority illnesses (such as statin use in people with ischemic heart disease). Critics argue that the information in the adverts is often biased and misleading, and that DTCA raises prescribing costs without net evidence of health benefits."
[Written drug advertisements--are they reliable?] (Tidsskr Nor Laegeforen. 2006) "CONCLUSION: Only half of the information presented in drug advertisements was correct and clinically relevant. Relatively few statements were false, but a considerable proportion of statements gave an excessively positive picture of the product; hence, in general, this kind of information has no value as a source of information."
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