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How many advertisements are you bombarded with on a daily basis for prescription drugs?  Certainly the onslaught of advertisements cannot be helping the prices of these drugs go down, but all that advertising must be helping people discover drugs that will change their life, right?  Well, it doesn’t appear that way.  According to a recent Reuters article, the $3 billion that was spent in 2005 to advertise drugs made little impact on the amount of prescriptions filled.

“A person needs to see an ad, get motivated by that ad, contact their doctor for an appointment, show up at the appointment, communicate both the condition and the drug to the doctor, convince the doctor that this drug is preferable to other alternatives, then actually go out and fill the prescription. This is a chain of events that can break at any point.”

This according to Stephen Soumerai of Harvard Medical School.  Though tv advertisement campaigns did result in sale spikes for some drugs, the overall effect in regard to sales seems to be minimal.  This begs the question; “why not save some of that advertisement money and use it to bring down the cost of drugs?”  This could also have the fringe benefit of drawing less people into the web of a drug they may not need.  That in turn would lead to less lawsuits brought by people who didn’t need to be on a drug in the first place.  Doctors are fallible, and patients can mis-self-diagnose.  Maybe less advertising could be a break in the chain.

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