COMMERCIALISM RUN AMOK

(Published in the East Bay Psychiatric Association Newsletter, October 2007


Excessive advertising has always been a pet peeve of mine. It is difficult to watch a ballgame on TV these days without being inundated with ads for cars and trucks, and more recently even for medications for erectile dysfunction. You’d think people watching these games had nothing else to purchase but another gas guzzling vehicle, or for that matter, care to have it suggested to them that they might need an erection-enhancing medication.

Our economy depends on people purchasing things, and commercials are the engines that propel those purchases. There comes a time, however, when people have to realize that things are either “bought” or they are “sold.” You “buy” something when you have a need or desire to make a particular purchase, and go out make that purchase. You are “sold” something, when no such need or desire exists within you until enough glossy ads, store models, or media commercials seduce you into thinking that purchasing that product is in your interest. One’s long term financial stability may actually be based on how well one is able to make this distinction.

It is one thing when cars and trucks, fancy clothing, or high-tech gadgets are pushed on us by commercials. But it is quite another when prescription pharmaceutical agents become the daily grist of advertisers. This morning my computer’s home page had an ad for a “Seven day free trial of Ambien-CR.” In just one click you can be connected to a “health care provider” who will send you this free sample, become registered to get a free monthly newsletter on sleep problems, and get to be part of a group of people who will be nurtured along and encouraged to take this medication. Imagine that. You go onto your computer for some routine e-mail, and you get a message to take a sleeping pill free for seven nights—perhaps just long enough to get you accustomed to it so that you become a long-term customer.

This direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription pharmaceutical agents is a good example of commercialism run amok. We physicians must speak up about this intrusive and inappropriate behavior on the part of drug manufacturers. If you think Madison Avenue should determine diagnoses and enlist physicians to get people started on controlled substances, then perhaps you are in the wrong field. We physicians have a fiduciary responsibility to tell our patients what is in their interest—not in the interest of some corporate entity. If one wants to be a salesperson, fine, but that should not be confused with the art and science of practicing medicine.

Don’t get me wrong. I use the fancy pens drug companies give me, find it handy to put the free boxes of tissues out in my office which contain the drug company’s logo, and enjoy the free dinners that these companies sometimes provide. But after seeing that ad on my computer this morning for a free sample of Ambien-CR, I have made a vow to stop enabling these companies’ improper behavior. I will no longer accept or use any of these free offers and will tell the drug reps that visit my office just how I feel about this behavior of advertising directly to the consumer. I hope you will consider doing the same. After all, if someone needs Ambien-CR because they have a serious problem with insomnia, the treating physician is the proper one to make that judgment, not someone in a pharmaceutical company’s sales or marketing department, or worse yet, an anonymous physician employed by that company to write a prescription for such a product.