I thought this might be a pretty good post to have by itself because it would carry different comments compared to the other thread, but the reason that so many drug ads are on US television compared to anything else is because the US and New Zealand are the only countries that don't outright ban direct-to-consumer drug advertisements. This ban was lifted under Bill Clinton's FDA in 1997 under the caveat that the ads list all the side effects, but of course they didn't realize how much they'd advertise.
Advertising directly to doctors was never banned, which is how Purdue Pharma, run by the Sackler family, members of the Triple Parentheses Gang, were able to outright lie to doctors about how OxyContin was non-addictive, resulting in its over-prescription and the current opioid epidemic.
https://jheor.org/post/2674-with-tv-drug-ads-what-you-see-is-not-necessarily-what-you-get
It's a strange concept to sell the idea of a prescription drug to consumers when we can't buy it, and the insurance company can deny payment. Besides I didn't go to school for a decade to make those kind of decisions
Every doctor I’ve ever known will prescribe whatever I asked for (provided I do my research and lie/invent symptoms for him)
They just want an easy life and ubiquitous commercials on TV tell us many people behave the same way.
Talk about something that is fairly terrifying. What do they call that sort of thing "the banality of evil"
Yeah my experience is that as long as it's not a controlled substance doctors don't really give a shit. Even if it is a controlled substance it's not a problem if you find the right doctor. I could become a dealer and get more pussy than I ever have in my life...
Shit, you've got "celebrity dentists" out here keeping people high with full tanks of NO2 delivered to their homes.
Unless its ivermectin for covid
Because that doctor might risk whatever kickbacks from the pharma company if they found out the doctor sold something that did not have a massive profit margin, which ivermectin does not have like something still covered by exclusive patent rights.
I had no idea such toothpaste existed
Erm, I can order it from Amazon Canada.
Mexicans are far more free - they just sell everything at the pharmacy
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Sensodyne-Repair-and-Protect-Sensitive-Toothpaste-Extra-Fresh-3-4-Oz/23814511
Reading the ingredients, the only difference in formulation is that this is .454% flouride and the clinpro is 1.1% flouride, and the clinpro has a proprietary tri-calcium phosphate ongredient that's supposed to help with penetration of the enamel to remineralize past the surface layer, which you'd only need if your teeth were absurdly leeched already.
Its almost exactly the same thing.
What are you talking about? It doesn't do that.
https://www.solventum.com/en-us/home/f/b00005767/
This is the manufacturer's website and product spec. This is just a high-concentration flouride toothpaste that has some proprietary ingredients to help remineralize enamel. It's also higher acid and lower grit, so it doesn't work exactly normal toothpaste and isn't formulated for regular daily use. And it absolutely doesn't regrow enamel. Nothing does, yet; that's a big research focus in dentistry right now, for obvious fucking reasons.
No shit your dentist said "you don't need that". You don't sound like you're at high risk for developing lesions, and can stay with the standard formulation. This is why specialty drugs require a prescription; there's no such thing as a cure-all panacea that can be taken by anyone at any time in any concentration that cures whatever ailment you want.
Don't spread bullshit.
In Canada, drug advertisements either can name the brand name of the drug but not the disease it treats. Or can name the disease but not the name of the drug.
But there's still millions & millions spent on drug ads despite these restrictions. For some drugs like Viagra, Tylenol or Advil, drug ads still make sense simply for brand loyalty & market share on legacy drugs that don't need explanations. Similar to how Coke can make ads not about soda.
But the drug ads also push brand new drugs without any mention of disease or indication. These must rely on word-of-mouth, that people will hear about the brand name from friends, anecdotes or MSM and have curiosity & FOMO get them to ask their doc for it directly.
The opposite of the brand-name-only ad approach is the fake PSA where the pharmaceutical companies don't name their drug but try to create new customers for benign diseases & moral panic. There was a campaign not that long ago trying to shame men into treating toenail fungus, implying that it wasn't simply a cosmetic discoloration but in fact a moral failing & a sinister infectious disease that could be spread to others. The campaign featured schoolmarm female doctor hectoring in lab coats talking down to men. The campaign hidden as a PSA seemed to be engineered by whatever company pushes Jublia, a nail lacquer that costs between 600-1000 bucks for the treatment course.
"Talk to your doctor about Prolapsic today!"
Drug ads in Canada
Some drugs are surprisingly affordable out of pocket and drug companies often have programs for people who can't afford their meds. Insurance can refuse to pay but they can't stop you from filling a prescription by other means.
Make sure that you don't tell the pharmacist what your insurance is before attempting to buy it because once they know you have insurance, they are legally bound to charge you the insurance-dictated prices.
And insurance-dictated prices are frequently higher than out-of-pocket.
This isn’t entirely true, they’re also trying to force insurance immediately tied to name and id because of this. We’ve regulated healthcare into a corrupt, unsustainable money pit and their only answer at Washington is forcing people dumb enough to buy working class insurance to pony up the dough.
I mean the pharmacy is happy to take your money. Just tell them not to run it through insurance if you think/know denial will be an issue. Your second sentence is completely correct.
True, but most are expensive
You see pharma ads for the same reason you see Boeing ads. You think Boeing is trying increase their visibility and to reach airline executives through the fucking TV?
It's a protection racket. "Hmm, you're thinking about running a news story about negative side effects of our drugs or talking about the likely assassination of whistleblowers? Sure would be unfortunate you lost hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue."
TV stations -- and everyone on them -- work for the advertisers, not for you.
This is a good insight.
I will add that sometimes ads for non-consumer businesses like boeing or basf are targeting lawmakers as part of a lobbying effort. Senators watch the news and if a million dollar ad campaign swings one opinion it can net a multi-billion dollar contract.
It pains me, but I feel my Libertarian Arc is winding down.
I still stand by the principles, but pushing "free market" is not the best real world solution, and just allows a foot in the door for deeply bad actors, and an outflow of wealth to foreigners and corporations.
Sadly, there are no solid answers, since the elites are evil, and the people have been thoroughly de-moralized after the subversives did their long march through the institutions.
There is not, at present, a viable alternative, because the people themselves are deeply broken. Authoritarianism won't fix the issues, because the people themselves are a huge part of the problem. The will and knowledge isn't there...yet.
Things are changing, but it's a massive uphill battle because, again, everyone was so broken.
Pharma is a protected racket. The FDA controls who can and cannot participate. The government will gladly let deadly products stay on the market in exchange for money.
This is the opposite of a "free market."
For sure. I'm not saying free market is the problem just that, at least with the current morality of people, it can't really be the solution either.
Point is, even though it's not a free market, they got away with a lot of this shit because people support the idea of free markets, and don't realize how stacked everything is. "Free market," even if fake, let's them get away with a lot of evil. It's the worst of both worlds.
Again, it pains me to say, as I've always been pretty libertarian.
Heck, the concept of "markets" has been so twisted that when I hear some bad actors talk about it...it just seems like treason. I saw a video of that opposition leader lady in Venezuela talk about "opening up the markets" or whatever. That's just code for shipping real resources out to foreigners, in return for fiat currency. It sounds crazy, but they'd probably literally be better as a nation under their retarded socialism, than international "capitalism."
We'd need to completely rollback the federal reserve, banking, and fiat for anything to be viable. And if the people had the will to do that, or the knowledge to demand it, the change wouldn't even be necessary. Just seems like a bit of a Catch 22.
I think the problems are cultural and societal at the core, not economic.
I’m basically the same the past few years. I believe in free market, but that requires regulation by the people. To put it like that one video, “but the people are retarded.”
Not enough people have a policy of not rewarding bad behavior. I don’t really use drugs enough to care, but I totally might have a personal policy that I don’t buy drugs that I see constant advertising for. If I did I’d stick to it. I don’t want to reward that.
More realistically what I do have. I do not buy cosmetic items or video game currency. At all. I don’t recall having ever done it. I’m sure there’s some crazy exception where I bought a bundle of things and it happened to throw in some cosmetic item but was a better deal. Obviously I’m a weird exception because there’s things like Fortnite with many billions of revenue and my understanding is they’ve never sold anything but cosmetic items and in game currency.
So yes, we have to have regulation of the market, because the people are retarded.
I also used to be a lolbertarian until I realized the side that wants to win will always defeat those who want to be left alone
It is one of the more disturbing aspects of my time in the US as someone from elsewhere. I get the impression it's a heavily overmedicated nation just because of the ubiquity of the ads (although the SSRI statistics kind of confirm my suspicions).
Reminder that when you account for selection bias of studies ( researchers won't publish the studies that don't show positive results or show ambiguous negative results ), SSRIs don't have a clear beneficial effect on depression.
Their mutiple side effects, however, are relatively consistent across studies ( such as increasing anxiety, causing vertigo, sweating in bed, etc ).
I can definitely vouch for the vertigo, though only when I came off of them.
The general problem of selling ads on the free market with no guiding principles is that you're optimizing for profit margin over everything else. And what's the most profitable thing? Scams and subscriptions. Even better if it's a scam subscription that you're chemically addicted to. Almost all advertising is some kind of fraud.
I don't watch tv and use adblock, but I still see youtuber sponsor reads (at least the start of them) and they're basically all scams. I've been keeping a list and breaking them down into categories.
For a while I got nothing but Ulcer med commercials on YouTube. It made me really wonder if it knew something I didn't. The answer was No.
These ads are also for specific people if you start looking. We have been seeing ads for gay people and women. My wife is one of those, but doesn't have the desires shows on the ads.
"outright lie to doctors."
You mean the guys with the 8 year degrees? Aren't they supposed to be sophisticated? The gatekeepers of medicine? And a billion dollar company can just "lie" to them? For years? With no pushback? Uh.. sure.
Stop believing in the "high school" version of the story. It's created by simpletons to keep simpletons from thinking realistically.
It's both. Just like colleges are indoctrination programs, medical schools are as well. If it's eight years of bad education, talking about an eight year degree is meaningless...they just had you for longer.
When the pharma reps and lobbyists are helping dictate what you learn...it just means doctors are being lied to for longer and more efficiently.
If college can turn young adults into freaks, it can certainly turn doctors into misguided quacks.
Now, yes, doctors also share some blame, no question. But they really have been taught one way to do things, and are massively incentivized - both positively and negatively - not to question it. If the line is Oxy isn't addictive...you could lose your license (that you spent eight years and tons of money earning) for questioning that. They're probably even lying to themselves.
But, yeah, it is also worth talking about that doctors generally aren't just in it to help people. It's a massive industry, and they're there to make money.
It doesn't take an 8 year degree to recognize addiction. The "line" doesn't matter. The prescriptions were documented. They had "pain clinics" which were obvious to everyone including law enforcement. Everyone was in on it.
There was no lying involved in the decision making. Just money.
I remember reading about this. I think one of the most insidious things is the fact that "Ask your doctor about" is a trademarked phrase owned by a pharmaceutical company.
So if you heard that in a drug commercial, it means that commercial came straight from the drug company's marketing department, selling the drug directly to you.
is majority caused by imported fentanyl, mostly from China. Fentanyl causes the majority of drug OD deaths in the USA and almost none of it is from prescription diversion.
Doctors handing out oxycodone like candy, with kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies was a huge problem decades ago though. But today's street opioid ODs crisis has very little to do with prescribed painkillers. So today's problems mostly driven by contraband for recreational use.
Different story in Mexico and South America. People can get their hands on basically anything in ''pharmacies'' and the governments rarely give a fuck.