Should Direct To Consumer Drug Ads Be Banned Essay

878 Words2 Pages

From the large billboards on the highway to the commercials that interrupt our favorite shows, advertisements are all around us. These works of capitalism try to persuade the viewer to try a certain product, stay at a certain hotel, or buy any of the wide variety of goods and services available to them. These types of ads are common in every country; however, there is one product whose advertisements can only be shown legally in the United States and New Zealand: prescription medicine (Tyler). Prescription medication ads, also called direct-to-consumer ads, advertise to the public and lead to misinformation and over-prescription. Some say that these ads have to be legal because they notify patients about potential treatment options, but this simply is not true. For the previous reasons, I believe that the United States should ban direct-to-consumer drug advertisements. Just like …show more content…

The idea behind this argument is that they increase awareness of potential diseases and encourage people to visit their doctor. There are multiple things wrong with this argument. First of all, the statistics do not agree with this statement. According to an article published in the US National Library of Medicine, only four percent of patients went to their doctor due to an advertisement that they saw (Gellad). Even with this small percentage, it can still cause problems within the visit itself. This is because conversations about ads “can affect patient goals, divert time away from disease screening or examinations, or pre-empt dialogue about healthy lifestyle changes or mental health issues” (Ventola). In layman’s terms, this means that when patients go to their doctors with assumptions about their health, it can actually negatively affect them. The argument in favor of having direct-to-consumer ads are almost non-existent, and the negatives of having them outweigh the

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