Hospital advertising to consumers is now coming under scrutiny
“Direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs had come under intense scrutiny in the wake of the recent Vioxx debacle. Experts across many fields felt that the huge advertising effort behind Vioxx and other cox-2 inhibitors contributed to an over-prescribing of the drugs, and the subsequent heart-related problems experienced by some users.
Ads by medical centers are a more recent phenomenon, another product of an increasingly competitive health-care market, but they have not been analyzed so closely.”
