An Interactional Perspective of Pharmaceutical Commercials

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An Interactional Perspective of Pharmaceutical Commercials
There are many arguments within scholarly articles, pharmaceutical corporations, medical institutions and the media regarding the effects of the advertisements of prescription medications on consumers. If you google “Direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising (DTCPA) of prescription drugs”, over a million hits including petitions for banning and the regulation of ads, will flood your screen (Donohue 2006:659). DTCPA is defined as “any promotional effort by a pharmaceutical firm to present prescription drug information to the general public through the lay media” (Ventola 2011:669). Despite the controversy over the DTCPA, American consumers are increasingly bombarded with advertisements for depression, insomnia, diabetes, and copious amounts of other ads aimed at providing concoctions for serious diseases and our everyday ailments. Who are these ads targeted towards and what do they imply about society’s perceptions of what it means to be a healthy person in America? This article will analyze three prescription advertisements, Cymbalta, Boniva and Cialis from a sociological interactional perspective and highlight relevant aspects of gender in the realm of the pharmaceutical industry.
The United States is one of two countries where DTCPA is legal. Those who support the DTCPA debate that ads inform consumers and make patients aware of a variety of options of treatments. Those who oppose it assert that it is harmful to the public, taking into account that it elevates additional health costs, impacts the relationships between doctors and patients and has the ability to manipulate consumers by giving misleading information (Blose and Mack 2009:315). Furthermore, because stu...

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...owards different age groups and genders and shows the remarkable ways in which the industry constructs ideas of health, gender roles and tells us what it means to be a healthy person in this society. The implications that the DTCPA has on consumers can be detrimental by the manipulation of information, the elevation of inadequate health costs and the influence it may have on a relationship between a doctor and their patients. With women as the target audience, these companies have the ability to create a market for disease and shape our assumptions about genders further perpetuating the inequalities and limiting the studies that are done by concentrating on men as the primary test subjects for research. In order to make research and health issues more representative, it is imperative that these issues be addressed to be able to treat the entire society effectively.

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