Posted on 09/10/2025 7:17:17 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
President Donald Trump has delivered another blow in his ongoing battle with the pharma industry, signing a memorandum on Tuesday that directs the FDA to rein in direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertising.
The initiative, which has long been a priority for Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is designed to roll back a 1997 policy shift that gave drugmakers a greater ability to advertise their products on television by relaxing the requirements on the information they must reveal about a treatment’s side effects.
In his directive, Trump cited the power of the FDA—vested by Congress in 1962—to regulate drug advertisements, ensuring they provide balanced information on benefits and risks of products.
In a separate announcement parallel to the presidential memorandum, the FDA revealed that it was cracking down on deceptive drug advertising and was sending “thousands” of letters warning companies to remove their “misleading” ads. The FDA also said that it issued roughly 100 “cease-and-desist” letters to companies that run deceptive ads.
“For far too long, these ads have distorted the doctor/patient relationship and have created artificial demand for medications regardless of their clinical appropriateness,” FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, M.D., said in a social media post on Tuesday night.
Online pharmacies, which "have been increasingly promoting drugs with no mention of side effects at all,” were among the companies that received the letters, Makary said.
The FDA added that it was working to close the “adequate provision” policy from 1997, which triggered the flood of TV ads.
“Pharmaceutical ads hooked this country on prescription drugs,” Kennedy said in the release. “We will shut down that pipeline of deception and require drug companies to disclose all critical safety facts in their advertising. Only radical transparency will break the cycle of overmedicalization that drives America’s chronic disease epidemic.”
(Excerpt) Read more at fiercepharma.com ...
We don’t even have our TV hooked up at home but for the past two weeks we’ve been staying at a hotel while repairs are being made to our house. We had extensive damage from a tree falling on the roof. Anyway we noticed that there’s just one after another drug ad on TV. Half the time you can’t figure out what affliction its even for.
Neurotin
Vioxx
Oxycontin
Tylenol
Statins
Johnson’s Baby Powder
I’m sure I’ve missed drugs in which Big Pharma lied to the public and doctors to make extra $ billions.
All of the above were approved by the FDA.
Here is one situation I recently experienced. My blood potassium level was very high. I was offered a recently created prescription for a drug that cost over $500 per month. I remembered that 2-3 months prior, I needed a prescription for sodium bicarbonate to resolve the high potassium level.
Sodium bicarbonate is baking soda. Turns out that 1/2 teaspoon mixed in a glass of water will reduce the blood high potassium problem. Just stir it into a glass of water and drink it. That has gotten my blood potassium level down to normal.
Do you know why your potassium was high?
Can’t say I have the best diet. That, plus I have Stage 4 metastatic prostate cancer. Also have chronic kidney disease. Kidney-related blood numbers aren’t all that good. Working on trying to improve them.
Just ordered a book written by Dr. Mary Bowden. She the one who lost hospital privileges at a major Houston hospital system because she was treating Covid-19 patients with Ivermectin with great success. She’s also a big supporter of using Ivermectin for quite a number of other health issues.
Some people claim it can also treat kidney disease and maybe even prostate cancer.
I am quite familiar with Dr. Bowden. Someday Houston Methodist Hospital and the Texas Medical Board are going to pay for the way they went after her for putting the well-being of her patients first.
Hope she can help your health issues.
Vioxx was particular egregious. They deleted data about increased heart related problems during the clinical trials. They lied and got caught. They simply wrote the checks to the victims and the government. A check does not bring back a dead husband, wife, brother, or child.
Merck once the most respected drug company in the world should have been destroyed by bankruptcy for this. They were not. If they had of another company would have bought it at a bargain price and those great researchers would have continued their great work. It should be noted that a clinical trial can be hundreds or thousands of trials in different hospitals or outpatient clinics. The individual running each trial has only a small fraction of the data from all the trials thus he or she can not say if this is a bad drug or a good drug. They just submit their data. Those that receive the data and assimilate all the data from many individual trials are where the evil is. They manipulate the data and bingo, the drug is approved.
As a young pharmacist I believed Merck, Pfizer, Astra etc. absolutely. As an old retired clinical pharmacist I do not.
We recently tossed a barely open bottle of extra-strength Tylenol. Good riddance.
I’ve had four surgeries these past ten years. Three of the four surgeons prescribed Gabapentin for off-label use. I guess they weren’t aware of the Kaiser Health lawsuit about 20 years ago.
Before/if I go under the scalpel again, I will demand to know the drugs my surgeon intends to prescribe.
It is my undestanding that drug adds are not prohibited by the EO but rather the ads must include the complete list of side effects.
The complete list is considerable and if included in the ad might be so great as to direct attention away from the actual product.
I can not confirm that thought however, I do not recall the source
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.