Direct-to-Consumer Advertising and the Demise of the Ideal Model of Health Care

White, Ronald F., Independent Review

In recent years, pharmaceutical companies have begun to market expensive new drugs directly to consumers via television ads. These new drugs target some of our most common medical problems, such as allergies, heartburn, erectile dysfunction, and attention-deficit disorder. Those same corporations, however, have come under fire for mass-marketing drugs previously approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but later deemed to be unsafe, including Rezulin, Fen-Phen, Vioxx, and Baycol. In 2001, Bayer Pharmaceutical's Baycol, a cholesterol-lowering drug, was withdrawn from the market under the cloud of approximately eight thousand pending lawsuits. Some critics of the FDA …

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Publication information: Article title: Direct-to-Consumer Advertising and the Demise of the Ideal Model of Health Care. Contributors: White, Ronald F. - Author. Journal title: Independent Review. Volume: 11. Issue: 2 Publication date: Fall 2006. Page number: 223+. © 2009 Independent Institute. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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