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"Have you asked your doctor about Singulair?"
"Ask your doctor about Detrol LA."
"Could Procrit be right for you?"
"Ask your doctor if Zocor would work for you."
With increasing frequency, television viewers are being bombarded by commercials for prescription drugs to treat everything from bladder problems to high cholesterol to depression. Pharmaceutical companies spend in excess of $2.5 billion a year advertising their products, and that figure leaps each year. It's a trend that worries some Las Vegas physicians who say patients are now trying to self-diagnose their ailments.
"I think doctors in general have issues with it on several levels," says Dr. Lane Friedman as he discusses what's called 'direct-to-consumer marketing.'
"Doctors in general don't need patients to tell them about good medicine," Dr. Friedman tells Channel 8 Eyewitness News. "They (the ads) may help us recognize a condition, but we don't necessarily have to use the expensive medicine they saw on television."
The television commercials usually promote the newest and most expensive drugs on the market. Six of the ten most-advertised medications are also among the 20 biggest revenue-grossers for the drug companies.
At the Friedman Diagnostic Clinic, the doctor has a closet chock-full of those popular new medications, all free samples supplied by the manufacturers. There's Prozac, Detrol LA, Clarinex, Singulair, Lipitor, Zoloft -- and many more.
"There's virtually an army of drug (company) representatives that come and see us," Dr. Friedman says. "We may see five or ten on a given day, if we let them."
The internal medicine specialist says the samples serve a useful purpose in that they allow his patients to try a drug -- to see whether it works -- before having to buy it. "The last thing you want to do is give them a prescription, have them take one pill, and find out they have a terrible reaction to it. Then they've wasted all that money."
But Friedman says the pharmaceutical companies only give him samples of their latest products, which -- in the long run -- can end up costing a patient even more.
"Prilosec. We had samples and samples and samples for years," Dr. Friedman says. But since the manufacturer's patent expired and the product went generic, the doctor has been given only AstraZeneca's replacement drug, Nexium.
"You are essentially unable to sample them the relatively inexpensive medicines to try, because the only ones you're given samples of are the new, expensive medications that do not come in generic form."
Dr. Friedman's comments are echoed by Art Clayton, a registered pharmacist at Costco.
"I think that it (marketing) promotes demand for something that is not there. It's just promoting the drug. I think there are much better ways of treating things with cheaper drugs, drugs that are on the market for a longer period of time."
Clayton points out that prescription prices are soaring, and he thinks he knows why: "Someone has to pay for that advertising, and the patient is paying for it."
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