IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/bushor/v53y2010i2p221-228.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A defense of direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising

Author

Listed:
  • Cox, Anthony D.
  • Cox, Dena

Abstract

Within the past 20 years, consumer advertising of prescription drugs has grown from a rarity to one of the most pervasive forms of consumer advertising, with ads for antidepressants and heart medications now as common as those for fast food and automobiles. At the same time, direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising has attracted a growing chorus of criticism from consumer advocates, health professionals, and elected officials. This article explores the extent to which such criticism has merit and the extent to which it lacks soundness. Specifically, the article casts doubt on the charges that (1) DTC advertising is deceptive; (2) DTC downplays product risks; (3) DTC focuses on trivial or imaginary maladies; (4) DTC doesn't promote non-pharmaceutical solutions to health problems; (5) DTC harms the doctor-patient relationship; and (6) DTC is responsible for the rapid rise in drug costs.

Suggested Citation

  • Cox, Anthony D. & Cox, Dena, 2010. "A defense of direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 53(2), pages 221-228, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:bushor:v:53:y:2010:i:2:p:221-228
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007-6813(09)00181-5
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Lisa M. Schwartz & Steven Woloshin & H. Gilbert Welch, 2007. "The Drug Facts Box: Providing Consumers with Simple Tabular Data on Drug Benefit and Harm," Medical Decision Making, , vol. 27(5), pages 655-662, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ho-Young (Anthony) Ahn & Jin Seong Park & Eric Haley, 2014. "Consumers' Optimism Bias and Responses to Risk Disclosures in Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) Prescription Drug Advertising: The Moderating Role of Subjective Health Literacy," Journal of Consumer Affairs, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 48(1), pages 175-194, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Pascal Aubertin & Thomas Frese & Jürgen Kasper & Wilfried Mau & Gabriele Meyer & Rafael Mikolajczyk & Matthias Richter & Jan Schildmann & Anke Steckelberg, 2023. "Efficacy of Three Numerical Presentation Formats on Lay People’s Comprehension and Risk Perception of Fact Boxes—A Randomized Controlled Pilot Study," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 20(3), pages 1-16, January.
    2. Priya Bahri & Geoffrey Bowring & Brian D. Edwards & Christopher Anton & Jeffrey K. Aronson & Angela Caro-Rojas & Bruce P. J. Hugman & Peter G. Mol & Gianluca Trifirò & Katarina Ilic & Riadh Daghfous &, 2023. "Communicating for the Safe Use of Medicines: Progress and Directions for the 2020s Promoted by the Special Interest Group of the International Society of Pharmacovigilance," Drug Safety, Springer, vol. 46(6), pages 517-532, June.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:bushor:v:53:y:2010:i:2:p:221-228. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/bushor .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.