I’ll take another shot at DTC marketing

“The two popular painkillers Vioxx and Celebrex, heavily marketed as ‘super-aspirin’, were prescribed for millions of patients who did not need them or should not have taken them, researchers said on Friday.

‘We found a rapid, nationwide shift away from older, inexpensive drugs with better established safety and efficacy to newer, costly drugs with no real history,’ said study author G. Caleb Alexander, a medical ethicist at the University of Chicago.

Within a year of being introduced in 1999, Vioxx and Celebrex were being heavily promoted as ‘super-aspirin’ and bringing in billions of dollars in revenue annually, the study said. Merck spent $161 million in 2000 on direct-to-consumer marketing of Vioxx, it said.”

Again, the one good thing to come of the COX-2 debacles is the increasing distrust of DTC advertising.

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