4 Creepy Ways Big Pharma Peddles its Drugs

[ellenrr]

A three-page consumer ad in the late 2000s similarly conveys that everyday psychological traits could actually be dire mental problems that require medication. If you are "talking too fast," "spending out of control," "sleeping less," "flying off the handle" and "buying things you don't need," you could be suffering from bipolar disorder said the ads, which appeared in magazines like People. And here you thought it was the coffee. Accompanying photos of a woman screaming into a phone and contorting her face are so extreme they could come out of the movie Halloween Part II, if the woman were holding a knife.

Psychiatric drugs are not just advertised for everyday personality problems. Pharma is pushing them for everyday pain conditions. Eli Lilly's original depression campaign for the antidepressant Cymbalta, "Depression Hurts," seems to anticipate its subsequent approval for pain conditions including back problems. Now ads tout Cymbalta as a "non-narcotic, once daily analgesic FDA approved for three indications across four different chronic pain conditions," as if it does not have severe controversial psychiatric risks including the suicide of volunteers who tested it.

And seizure and epilepsy drugs, known for major allergic and psychiatric reactions, are also becoming pain franchises. "What's causing your chronic widespread muscle pain?" asks an ad for the seizure and epilepsy drug Lyrica. "The answer may be overactive nerves," says the ad, even though "widespread muscle pain" and "over-active nerves," are not mentioned in the approved labeling for Lyrica, says pharmaceutical reporter John Mack. The military spent $35 million on seizure and epilepsy drugs in 2009 alone, including for migraines, headaches and pain.

And speaking of overkill, ads for genetically engineered injected drugs like Humira, approved to treat serious diseases like Crohn's disease, psoriatic arthritis and chronic plaque psoriasis look like they are designed to sell beer or beauty treatments, not immune suppressing drugs that invite cancers and lethal infections.


Martha Rosenberg
© 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/153677/

[MineralMan]

1. I don't like those ads either, but I don't condemn

the entire pharmaceutical industry because of them. For me, the listing of terrible side-effects sometimes associated with those medications is eye-opening. The requirement that the ads include that information acts as a counter-balance to the ads, in my opinion.

Further, in some cases, the medications are effective in new ways. Patients who have simply given up on finding a medication that can relieve their chronic symptoms may see these ads and visit their physicians to ask about them. That's a good thing, because the doctor can reassess the patient and determine whether there is something new that might help.

Yes, the ads are a bit over the top, but new indications for some of these medications can mean significant relief for some patients. It's always a balancing act.

I'll give you a personal example. I suffer from cluster headaches, which occur several times daily for a couple or three months at about two-year intervals. For over 20 years, I've dealt with them using oxygen, the most common treatment for individual headaches. Cluster headaches have another common name: Suicide headaches, and it's a pretty good name.

During my last two episodes, my physician suggested sumatriptan, just as something to try. Cluster headaches are off-label for sumatriptan, which is a medication for migraine headaches, but some cluster headache patients report interesting results. After my own experiments with the medication, I discovered that if I took it half an hour before the daily headaches began, I'd get 8 headache-free hours. Since the headaches seem to occur on a regular time schedule, this was very interesting to me, since it allowed me to get a full night's sleep. The drug's side effects are somewhat unpleasant for me, but the relief is valuable.

During my last episode, which was this past summer, I did another experiment with sumatriptan. Instead of just taking one occasionally to have a headache-free night, I tried taking one every day for about a week, at the time I usually took it. It gave me a week of freedom from headaches. After that week, the cluster ended in a few more days. I reported this to my doctor, who tells me he sees maybe two or three cluster headache patients a year. He was very interested in hearing this, and said he may see if other patients reported similar results with sumatriptan.

So, an off-label use of a medication sometimes turns into an on-label use. If others have similar results to what I reported, a study will no doubt be done to see if those results are typical or not. If those studies indicate that the drug is useful for cluster headaches, you can expect to see it be on-label at some point. Most off-label uses for medications that become on-label come from just such individual reports that are then tested on a larger sample.

[Celebration]

2. oh, that's interesting

Indeed, the more choices a person has in both prescription drugs and nutritional supplementation, the better! Possibly the drug will end up working for a lot of people the same way it worked for you.......if so, GREAT! If not, well, at least you were helped by it. Time will tell.

However, I am not sure this has much to do with the OP. The problem is trying to turn every little behaviour quirk into a "condition" which needs to be medicated. I find the trend to be extremely disturbing, and enormously expensive for our already overburdened health care system.

But trying drugs like you did in somewhat unusual ways? Go for it!! But it isn't as if your problem was shopping too much. That just really makes me go

[MineralMan]

5. Most physicians hate those ads, too.

That's because people come in asking for a particular medication, without even knowing if their problem is suitable for that medication. However, most physicians will not prescribe such a medication unless it is indicated. Some will, of course, but they're lousy physicians if they do. What most physicians do when confronted with the situation is to evaluate the patient and determine if that medication is appropriate. If it's a current patient who is doing well on their current medication, most physicians will recommend sticking to their current meds. If they're not doing well, the physician may well go to the sample closet and let the patient try the new medication, using samples. Only poor physicians just fill requests from patients without evaluation.

As I said in my post, sometimes patients give up on being treated for something until they're stimulated to seek further medical advice by such an ad. Other times, ads are run when a new indication for that medication has been found. Those are the cases that bring people into the clinic with problems that haven't responded before.

If you don't have the condition, the ad will merely be annoying. They are almost all annoying to me.

[Warpy]

4. You made a great point about the side effects

which must be stated very clearly. Those put me off Lyrica, even if I could afford the stuff.

Drug commercials aimed directly at the public violate all sorts of ethics and put doctors under pressure to prescribe pills they know the patient doesn't need, just to make him go away. The docs all hope the patient doesn't feel any better on the drug and doesn't finish the prescription, but the company has made its money and they don't mind making money that way.

However, I can tell you what those commercials are like in my case: "Hey, that sounds like me, how interesting. Oh, it's correctable! Oh, the side effect can be death? Oh, forget it!" I can't be alone in this.

[hedgehog]

7. You put your finger on the real problem - doctors unwilling to

take a stand when a prescription is inappropriate.

[Warpy]

8. Doctors get fired when they take too much of a stand

and believe it or not, they tend to care about some of their long term patients and don't want to see them go. So they issue the scrip and hope the patient doesn't bother refilling it because it was no miracle.

[HuckleB]

9. My experience has been the opposite with the docs I've worked with over time.

Patients don't typically walk out with prescriptions for specific medications they've seen advertised. On the other family history of someone doing well on a medication may make it more likely that the doc would prescribe that medication, if there is a genuine reason to prescribe it.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen the way you describe with some docs... but it's mostly foreign to my experience.

[MineralMan]

10. Not my internist.

He's very conservative with prescribing. He works for a large clinic that is a subsidiary of one of the largest hospital groups in the Twin Cities. I chose him, after seeing him once in urgent care. He's been great.

[LeftishBrit]

3. I am strongly against direct advertising by Pharma companies; it corrupts and distorts the whole

system of medical decision making. I am glad to say that it is not permitted in the UK or other EU countries; though the companies may have pernicious influences in more subtle ways.

However, I think that the article is too dismissive of the problem of chronic pain - which can be very serious; someone in my community just committed suicide because of it. My mother was in agony, and at times considered suicide, for several months until her condition was improved by an operation. Some forms of chronic pain, as in my mother's case, are caused by neuropathy; and such neurological conditions can indeed be (in some cases) treated by certain medications that started as antidepressants and anti-seizure medications. They do have dangers; are certainly not suitable for everyone; and should NOT be taken lightly; but there are also dangers in long-term use of large doses of over-the-counter painkillers - I've known people who nearly died from side-effects of aspirin; and there are dangers in having to endure severe chronic pain.

This is not to excuse Pharma drug-peddling; but having seen what my mother endured, I get frustrated when pain is dismissed as an 'everyday condition'. Minor pain may be; serious chronic pain should not be treated as such.

[HuckleB]

6. +1

Very well put on all accounts.

[gkhouston]

11. I had a friend who committed suicide when she couldn't handle the pain anymore.

IMO, too many patients with chronic pain are being undertreated, with devastating results.