Do Not Be Fooled By TV Rx Drug Ads
$GILD, $JNJ
US drug makers are required to inform consumers about potential side effects in their ads.
The Big Q: Have you noticed how the drug ad narrators take the scariness out of side effects, think about it, how is it that so many people voluntarily take, let alone ask their doctor for a drug that has very serious and in some cases lethal side effects?
“The actors paid to deliver these warnings … say there’s an art to it. ‘We use the same approach medical professionals do, telling a patient calmly: ‘We’re going to perform this surgery and there’s a 60% chance you won’t live,’’ said Joey Schaljo, who has worked as a voiceover actor on drug ads and who has a knack for narrating endless lists of side effects …Wild!
Some ads use one narrator to talk about the benefits of the drug and a different actor to recite the risks in a less engaging voice.
Or the warning section may be written with more complex sentence structures, to make it harder for viewers to understand. Another ad production “trick” is to keep the voice actor who talks about risks off screen.
Research tells the producers that consumers absorb the most information when they can see people speaking rather than just hearing them.
‘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,’ said Ruth Day, a cognitive scientist at Duke University who has studied drug ads for more than a decade.”
When we see the drug industry’s lackadaisical approach to side effects, both by their downplaying the risk of death or serious injury in their ads, and by their filing adverse event reports that are useless for predicting risk to other patients please understand that the we also pay for their crimes with our tax dollars.
Sovaldi, a Hepatitis-C drug made by Gilead (NASDAQ:GILD) was under investigation for 18 months by the Senate Finance Committee. In the end, the Committee decided that the price of the drug at $1,000 per pill, or $84,000 per treatment “did not reflect the cost of research and development and that Gilead cared about ‘revenue’ not ‘affordability and accessibility,’” the Epoch Times wrote.
In Y 2014 alone, Medicare and Medicaid shelled out more than $5-B for Sovaldi and another Hep-C drug called Harvoni.
Writing for the NY-T, Nicholas Kristof notes that in Y 2015, the drug industry “spent $272,000 in campaign donations per member of Congress … to bar the government from bargaining for drug prices in Medicare. That amounts to a $50-B annual gift to pharmaceutical companies.”
“But Gilead is far from the only drug company camping out on our tax dollars,” Epoch Times reports.
“Drug companies have devised elaborate schemes for drug sales to states … In 2008, the Texas attorney general’s office charged Risperdal maker Janssen (Johnson & Johnson’s psychiatric drug unit) with defrauding the state of millions ‘with [its] sophisticated and fraudulent marketing scheme,’ to ‘secure … Risperdal, on the state’s Medicaid preferred drug list’ …
The US Department of Veterans Affairs spent $717-M on Risperdal to treat PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) in troops deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq only to discover after 9 years that the drug worked no better than a placebo, Wilder!
In Texas, a Medicaid decision tree dubbd the Texas Medical Algorithm Project was instituted that mandates that doctors prescribe the newest and most expensive psychiatric drugs first.
The program was funded by the Johnson & Johnson-linked Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. And another tactic that drug companies use is helping states buy their own brand name drugs
One such program sends registered nurses to the homes of patients who are on expensive brand drugs to ensure compliance that they have not stopped taking the drugs.”
The conventional medical system in the US has created just as many or more problems than it has solved.
Drugs are vastly over prescribed and misused.
This is particularly true for antibiotics, as more than 80% of which are used in agriculture to fatten up livestock.
This routine practice has resulted in a man-made scourge of antibiotic-resistant disease, which rendering previously treatable infections lethal, and may soon turn even minor surgery into a dangerous proposition.
The Big Q2: What can do to protect yourself?
The Big A: Regarding antibiotics, avoid using them unless absolutely necessary, and remember they do not work for viral infections.
Also, always opt for Organic grass-fed and grass-finished meats, to avoid antibiotic residues and, more importantly, antibiotic-resistant bacteria that may kill you.
This is a very serious matter, so if you chose to eat meat, make sure it is clean.
Eat healthy, Be healthy, Live lively.
HeffX-LTN
Paul Ebeling
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