this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
130 points (97.8% liked)
Health - Resources and discussion for everything health-related
2195 readers
85 users here now
Health: physical and mental, individual and public.
Discussions, issues, resources, news, everything.
See the pinned post for a long list of other communities dedicated to health or specific diagnoses. The list is continuously updated.
Nothing here shall be taken as medical or any other kind of professional advice.
Commercial advertising is considered spam and not allowed. If you're not sure, contact mods to ask beforehand.
Linked videos without original description context by OP to initiate healthy, constructive discussions will be removed.
Regular rules of lemmy.world apply. Be civil.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A lot of these companies spend more on marketing than R&D. If they want help lowering their costs, we can ban pharmaceutical advertisements like the rest of the world does.
Testing costs prevent drugs that will save a few lives from being tested. Instead, hair growth, penis pills, and now weight loss drugs are being developed. A million people with smaller issues are more profitable than one person with a severe issue.
Drugs should be developed and tested through public private partnerships with universities. That could be paired with limitations on drug prices. We shouldn't even trust drug companies to do the testing. That would take a long way a lot of their costs. I doubt they'd like it though.
Don’t forget some marketing costs are allowed to count as R&D.
I forget about the marketing part because here, there isn't any direct marketing to the public. I always thought it was odd on US TV, "tell you doctor to prescribe..." No. The trained professional should be deciding which drug to prescribe.
Marketing to doctors also is a thing I guess, but there is some insulation from that in a nationalised health care system.
I often read arstechnica.com and one thing that annoys me is I often see prescription ads on their site. Most of the time I don't even know the illness they are trying to cure. Honestly I wonder how effective those ads are. Like who goes to a doctor like "I saw this ad for miracle pill and people at the end were happy. Give me that pill" and the doctor doesn't go "that's for an enlarged liver which you don't have... Why do you want that pill?"
The handful of meds I’ve asked for after having seen any advertising at all, the advertising was incidental. I followed Sunosi for a decade before it was approved and I asked for it. The ads weren’t a part of it.
I followed the eight hour version of sodium oxybate for about the same amount of time, and ended up disillusioned with it because of the risk of getting no fucking sleep at all if the first dose failed.
Patients who are able absolutely should follow the promising compounds under development. I had a similar experience with provigil, waaaay back when there was nothing else except methylphenidate.
DTC advertising needs to go away.
Patients need to be more informed about the pipeline and current studies.
Both can be true.