This is an advertisement on YouTube from the US for a sustained-release version of the drug that was to be used in the aborted Australian NEURAPRO-Q trial on young patients. I'd normally never encourage my readers to access advertisements of pharmaceutical drugs, and the broadcasting of such material is, I believe, banned in Australia, but I think the listing of potential side effects in this ad might just have the effect of putting you off prescrition mind drugs for life. There is no need for the guys from The Chaser to do a spoof of this ad. This is an advertisement that satirizes itself. To quote one wag who left a comment on the video at YouTube "You may end up dead, but at least you won't commit suicide."
Listing the often horrid side effects of medications is recent (past 6 years?)in the US and happened during the last Bush administration which really intrigued me as the general policy of Republican politics is lack of government telling large corporations to do anything against their best financial benefit...so why suddenly require them to mention side effects that might make people avoid buying the medication ? Granted, it saves insurance companies and government supported medicaid from having to shell out money to buy meds if people are afraid to take them and probably adds some protection in law suits but I was shocked that the "big-pharma" didn't put the breaks on this current requirement .
ReplyDeleteI guess if the drug companies are allowed to present the supposed benefits of the product in ads, they should also be obliged to present the rest of the story too. Over here in Australia we have a drug regulation authority which in quite useless, and we have a very different legal system that does not give as much access to the legal system to ordinary people. In some areas I think the US is superior to the way we do things here, but regarding drug advertising I prefer the situation that we have here in Australia, with drug ads being restricted to doctor's publications, so there's not the same phenomenon here with ridiculously long disclaimers in TV ads. Even better would be ban ads for this type of product altogether - decisions about prescribing medications should be well above the level of advertising.
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