Newsflash: DTC ads aren’t educational

From the new drug-gossip blog, Pharmalot:

A handful of professors scoured the ads that ran during a month’s worth of prime-time and evening-newshour television and saw this:

1 – The ads “provide limited information about the causes of a disease or who may be at risk;
2 – The ads show people who’ve lost control of their lives without help from medicines;
3 – The ads “minimize” the virtues of better health through lifestyle changes.

The study, which appears in The Annals of Family Medicine, reaches this conclusion: DTC ads have “limited” educational value and may “oversell” the benefits of drugs in way that may conflict with promoting health.

(via Peter Rost)