Re: Up To A Million Kids Misdiagnosed!

[Wgreen]

After reflection, another observation:

Perhaps these stats reveal something more fundamental about the way American healthcare works today.

Until the 1980s, pharmaceuticals in the U.S were promoted exclusively to doctors. Then something happened. The following excerpt is from a piece on NPR (America’s National Public Radio) in October 2009:

“… [Until the 1980s] doctors exclusively held the keys to the kingdom, drug companies spent enormous amounts of time and money trying to get their attention. To give you a sense, the average doctor got around 3,000 pieces of mail a year from the drug industry, and to break through this noise often took years.

And so [Joe] Davis, who had previously only sold packaged goods, approached William Castagnoli, the then-president of a large medical advertising company. The two came up with a solution: They would advertise directly to the patient. They’d get the patient to go in and ask the doctor for the drug. “Pull the drug through the system,” Davis says with a certain amount of glee.

There was only one small problem with this solution: It was almost impossible to do.

In the early 1980s, FDA [the Food and Drug Administration that oversees all prescription medications in the US] regulations required that drug ads include both the name of a drug and its purpose, as well as information about all the side effects. But side-effect information often took two or three magazine pages of mouse print to catalog, and this wouldn’t do for a major television campaign. As Castagnoli says, “We couldn’t scroll the whole disclosure information over the television screen — OK?”

But then, in 1986, while designing an ad for a new allergy medication called Seldane, Davis hit on a way around the fine print. He checked with the Food and Drug Administration to see if it would be OK.

“We didn’t give the drug’s name, Seldane,” he says. “All we said was: ‘Your doctor now has treatment which won’t make you drowsy. See your doctor.’

This was one of the very first national direct-to-consumer television ad campaigns. The results were nothing short of astounding. Before the ads, Davis says, Seldane made about $34 million in sales a year, which at the time was considered pretty good.

“Our goal was maybe to get this drug up to $100 million in sales. But we went through $100 million,” Davis says. “And we said, ‘Holy smokes.’ And then it went through $300 million. Then $400 million. Then $500 million. $600 [million]! It was unbelievable. We were flabbergasted. And eventually it went to $800 million.””

Clearly, the introduction of pharma TV advertising had enormous implications for drug companies’ bottom lines, but it also revealed something interesting about the doctor-patient relationship: Clinicians were willing to give their patients what THEY wanted. All they had to do was ask.

So, if up to a million kids are being “over-diagnosed,” it’s likely—in large part— because parents are ASKING for the diagnosis, and therefore for the meds, hoping that their youngsters will sit still and do better in school.

If adults are being under-diagnosed, it’s probably because pharma giants haven’t yet figured out how to get information that resonates out to that demographic.

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