Some Insight On The Hate | Arthritis Information

-By Mark Dolliver

If complaining about the pharmaceutical industry were good for one's health, Americans would be remarkably robust. Sure, Big Pharma's products often cure what ails us, despite our unhealthy habits. But this hasn't saved the prescription-drug industry from becoming a target of consumer resentment, as opinion surveys consistently demonstrate. Indeed, the fact that we need these products -- sometimes as a matter of life and death -- seems to make us all the more irate that companies make profits by selling them to us.

Beneath this general atmosphere of hostility, though, lies a more complex landscape of attitudes toward pharmaceutical companies and the ads with which they target consumers. People are eager to be educated about medical conditions and possible treatments of them, and polling shows they view consumer-targeted ads for prescription drugs as a valuable source of such information. If, for example, women are starting to understand something as arcane (but important) as the link between human papillomavirus and cervical cancer, it's because marketing efforts for a vaccine named Gardasil have introduced them to the topic.

Give consumers a chance to badmouth Big Pharma in general, and they'll seize the invitation. Indeed, a Gallup poll last month found people taking a dimmer view of the pharmaceutical industry than they do of the advertising/public relations sector, if you can imagine such a thing. It asked people to categorize their "overall view" of various industries on a spectrum from "very positive" to "very negative." While the "net positive" score (subtracting negative from positive views) was a woeful -10 for the ad/PR industry, it was an even-worse -14 for the pharmaceutical sector (see the bottom chart on page 27). That's at the low end of a range within which the number has bounced around in Gallup polling during this decade.

Part of the problem, of course, is that pharmaceuticals just aren't fun in the way soft drinks and cars and electronic gadgets are. Marcee Nelson, president of GSW Worldwide's Pink Tank division, a Columbus, Ohio-based agency that focuses on women and health, recounts something she heard at a recent focus group: "A woman who had been diagnosed with crippling rheumatoid arthritis said, 'I'm being forced to be a consumer of something I don't want.' People know that pharmaceutical products can cure them, make their conditions manageable, keep their families together longer. They know drugs save lives. But how can we ever expect them to love an industry with which they would rather not interact in the first place?"

Even when consumers feel a sense of attachment to the specific prescription drugs they use, this doesn't immunize them against negative attitudes toward the industry in general -- in part because so much advertising has spotlighted the individual brand rather than the company that makes it. "For the most part, consumers don't have well-established relationships with pharmaceutical manufacturers, and in many cases don't even know who makes the medicines they take," says Lynn Benzing, CEO of Patient Marketing Group, a Princeton, N.J.-based healthcare communications company. With positive messages focusing on brands rather than on companies, "'Big Pharma' has come to symbolize high prices, profiteering and safety-issue cover-ups in the minds of many consumers," Benzing adds.

Polling confirms that drug safety is a big issue for consumers. In a Kaiser Family Foundation/USA Today/Harvard School of Public Health survey conducted this past January, a narrow majority (55 percent) agreed that pharmaceutical companies "do enough to test and monitor the safety of their drugs," while 41 percent said companies don't do enough. When a top-selling pain reliever like Vioxx is pulled off the market for increasing patients' risk of heart attack or stroke, consumers take note. (An online Reader's Digest article in the aftermath of Vioxx's 2004 recall said "millions of Americans panicked" when the news came out, no doubt ensuring further panic.)

To make matters worse, consumers don't necessarily trust the drug companies to be forthcoming about problems. That was evident in an October 2006 poll by Harris Interactive on behalf of the Pharmaceutical Safety Institute. It asked how confident respondents are that companies "will release any information they have about the adverse reactions of any of their drugs as soon as they have such information." Thirty-one percent were "not at all confident," and 26 percent were just "somewhat confident." Few were either "extremely confident" (4 percent) or "very confident" (10 percent), with the other 29 percent "fairly confident." The numbers were much the same when people were asked whether they think the companies would "eventually" disseminate all the information they have about the safety of their drugs.

 

I thought this was pretty interesting too.

 

 

And this:

 

 

Well said, thank you. I posted this thinking that it would get lots of attention because it explains so many of the feelings and emotions concerning medicines and big pharm and believing that it was extremely well studied and honestly explained. I got caught up in the belief that many members at this forum are anti-big pharm because so many posts are directed against our drugs and big pharm. The part that escaped me is that altho there are constant anti-pharm posts, they are authored by a very few members here, Pip, Joi, JSNM, Suzanne, Gimpy and a few other roadback members. But, I think that this article is very well done by ADWEEK and is beneficial to us and big pharm. And thanks again for the very accurate explanation. Well done.

 

LEV

 

I thank big pharma and my wonderful doctors. The rheumatoid arthritis had brought me to a point in my life where there was not a moment of happiness, just constant pain. It brought me to a point where I really didn't care whether I died and almost looked forward to it. Now I don't want to die and don't like to even think about it. Evryday I'm reminded that I am still sick but I can do so many things that I thought I'd never do again. I still realize that ra is a very serious disease and that ra drugs are very serious drugs with potential very serious side effects and try to watch for any sign of infection or drug related change and now that I've realized that my doctors are more knowledgable than I am, I go to urgent care right away when a change happens. I also trully blieve that the cure is just around the corner.

 

LEV