Most people have seen these ads. They grew up watching them. The products range from Pfizer’s Paxlovid (used in the treatment of Covid19) to weight loss pills, from pills for erectile dysfunction to ones that help you quit smoking.
These ads differ from over-the-counter drug commercials in that they need a prescription and so, end with “ask your physician is so-and-so drug is right for you.”
Calls to ban them have increased in recent years. The Council of Medical Colleges wrote to the Health Minister to include a provision in the recently passed Therapeutic Products Bill to end direct-to-consumer ads.
Green Party MP Ricardo Menendez March tabled an amendment to ban these adverts, and National opposed the bill saying it was opposed to, among other things, direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA).
Concerns around DTCA go back a long way. Consultation on direct-to-consumer advertising was last held in 2006, and the Ministry of Health published a summary of submissions. Interesting, back then, there were more medical practitioners who were supportive of the practice than opposed to it (while members of the public were decisively against DTCA).
Public opinion continues to favour a ban on direct-to-consumer advertising, and in recent years there have been growing calls from medical practitioners to end DTCA.
‘Countless hours lost’
For Dr Sean Hanna, a GP at Ora Toa Takapūwāhia Medical Centre in Porirua, information from these advertisements leads to precious time being wasted. “”He roa rawa te tatari ki te kite ki te tākuta i tenei wā. kei te tino hōhā ka haere mai ēnei tangata e hiahia ana i te kōrero mō ēnei pire i kite i te poaka whakaata,” he says. “No te mea i te nuinga o te wā kaore e tika ki te kai mō ēnei tāngata.”
(Wait times to see a doctor are very long right now, and it’s a hōhā when people come asking about some pill they saw on TV. Most of the time, these pills are not right for the patient.)
Green Party MP Ricardo Menendez March seconds him, saying GPs are spending “countless hours dealing with the information in these advertisements instead of serving our communities and addressing our health inequities”.
The other problem, says Hanna is that “most of the time, these pills in these ads are very expensive”. Māori health researcher and Massey University associate professor Dr Lisa Te Morenga says “it doesn’t make sense to have commercial interests that are trying to convince patients that they need to take expensive drugs over the drugs that our Pharmac has decided the most appropriate for us”.
“He aha te mea nui ki ngā kamupene nui o te ao? Ko te hauora? Ko te tangata? kao. Ko te putea kē,” says Dr. Sean Hanna.
(What is important to these large companies of the world? Health? People? No, it’s profits.)
‘Increased health awareness’
But Medicines New Zealand chief executive Dr Graeme Jarvis says DTC advertising is already well regulated, and covered by six separate acts of Parliament. “We are not in support of the proposed ban as we consider that extreme over-reach,” Jarvis says. A ban would also mean patients would get their information from unregulated sources from overseas rather than from regulated sources here in New Zealand, he says.
Medicines New Zealand also says DTCA encourages patients to act on undiagnosed or poorly managed conditions, and that patients feel better about medicines when they have initiated discussion and been involved in decision-making.
When tabling the bill, Health Minister Ayesha Verrall acknowledged the concerns over DTCA but said that “officials have looked at the evidence around direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription medicine, and they did not find sufficient evidence to justify a ban”.
The bill passed its third reading with 74 votes in favour to 45 against, and did not include proposed amendments to ban DTCA.
