Free Republic

More evidence that liberals suffer from enlarged ego syndrome. So Democrats don’t like all those ads for prescription drugs on T.V. – the ones for high cholesterol, enlarged prostates, dry eyes and, yes, ED. On C-Span recently, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D., Calif., said “a lot of people start thinking they have medical problems because they’ve seen too many of these commercials. I don’t think that’s doing the public a lot of good. It’s certainly making the drug companies richer, but it’s not doing a lot of good for the public.” That statement tells us an...

Primary-care doctors are easily persuaded to prescribe antidepressants -- even unnecessarily -- when a patient mentions having seen television advertisements for them, researchers reported Tuesday. . In an unusual experiment in which actresses posed as mildly depressed patients who did not need medication, doctors were five times more likely to write them prescriptions when an ad for a specific drug was mentioned. Drug companies spend roughly $3 billion a year on direct-to-consumer advertising, fomenting sharp debate over how much sway the advertisements have over doctors. The study showed the effect is significant. "When patients ask for a drug, they tend...