Drug TV Ads are selling Dangerous Drugs that can harm you and I

http://www.alternet.org/drugs/why-tv-drug-ads-work-despite-disclosing-terrifying-side-effects?akid=14058.294211.aNP3Vg&rd=1&src=newsletter1052471&t=10

The task for drug advertisers was how to meet the requirement of stating major risks and prevalent adverse effects in a manner so that viewers do not care about them, ensuring the warning section will not interfere with the placement in viewers’ minds of those billboards of life-changing improvements.

While the FDA has scolded drug companies for using blatant techniques to distract viewers away from the warning section, STAT (“How Drug Ad Narrators Take the Scariness Out of Side Effects”) notes, “The FDA can’t do much about ads that bore consumers into ignoring the side effect lists.” Health and medicine publication STAT details how “the warning section may be written with more complex sentence structures, to make it harder for viewers to absorb.” STAT quoted Ruth Day, a cognitive scientist at Duke University who has studied drug ads: “There’s a shift in how the voice is used to make it easier to understand the benefits and less easy to understand the risks.” So, for example, a hurried warning narration makes it much harder to remember the warning section.

A major technique used to weaken the impact of the warning section is for it to be reported by an off-screen voice. In contrast, we routinely see a person having life-changing improvement after taking the drug, and seeing that person’s transformation creates a mental billboard. These techniques are exemplified in an often-broadcasted commercial for Abilify, advertised as an antidepressant booster medication (for which it was FDA approved in 2007). This commercial does not inform viewers that Abilify is an antipsychotic drug, originally approved by the FDA in 2002 for schizophrenia. Instead, the ad tells us, “Approximately 2 out of 3 people being treated for depression still have unresolved symptoms”—an assertion we hear and also see written on a blackboard. And the ad directs itself to depressed people for whom an “antidepressant alone is not enough”—this also accompanied by a visual, a 6-second blackboard scene showing a list of well-known antidepressants plus a container of Abilify.