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Questions swirl around drug ads for patients

Many doctors at the AMA Annual Meeting said they still hated them, but others are learning to live with them and even see benefits.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, amednews staff. July 9/16, 2001.

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Chicago -- When Arthur Silk, MD, writes a prescription for atorvastatin calcium -- sold under the trade name of Lipitor -- he knows that there's a chance that his patient will leave his office without it. Or that they'll take the prescription, but not fill it. Or that even if they do, they might not take it as instructed.

The drug, manufactured by Pfizer Inc., however, is heavily advertised directly to consumers, and Dr. Silk believes this makes his patients more likely to follow doctor's orders.

"When I recommend it, they don't always take the prescription," the Garden Grove, Calif., internist said during a debate about direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising at last month's AMA Annual Meeting in Chicago. "[But] when they see the ad in the paper, they call me up and say they'd like it."

Dr. Silk is part of a growing number of physicians who have learned to like direct-to-consumer ads, or at least to live with them.

"It's too late to ban direct-to-consumer advertising," said Sandra Adamson Fryhofer, MD, immediate past president of the American College of Physicians--American Society of Internal Medicine. "The cat's out of the bag."

Some doctors say it improves patient compliance because the ads act as regular reminders to take medication. The ads also bring people into the office to talk about conditions that they rarely asked doctors about before.

"I like DTC advertising," said Stuart Gitlow, MD, an addiction psychiatrist from Providence, R.I., and a delegate from the American Society of Addiction Medicine. "Individuals now come to me to stop smoking. Individuals never came to me prior to Zyban [bupropion hydrochloride] advertising specifically to stop smoking. Not once. The Zyban ads began and all of sudden people came to me and said: 'Help me stop smoking.' " [...]