Media ads for prescription drugs prompted 7.5 percent of people in a recent survey to ask their doctor about a prescription.
But the doctors only agreed about a third of the time.
They were more likely to go ahead and write a prescription when the person asking was over 65. Almost half of seniors (46.4 percent) were given a prescription for a medicine that they saw advertised and asked their doctor about.
In the same survey, 6 out of 10 people said that ads for nutritional supplements weren’t trustworthy, but 12 percent bought the supplements based on the ads anyway.
The information is based on the National Survey of Healthcare Consumers: Advertising for Prescription Drugs, conducted as part of the Thomson Reuters Pulse Healthcare Survey in collaboration with National Public Radio. Surveyers telephoned 3,013 households in early June asking if they had seen ads for prescription drugs and nutritional supplements.
The survey gathered information about ages, education, and household income and asked questions about ads, trusted sources of health information, and whether people asked doctors to prescribe drugs or purchased nutritional supplements based on ads they saw.
Two-thirds of people had seen or heard ads for prescription medicine. The percentage of people saying they were aware of ads rose with age, education and income.
About half of people thought that the ads balanced risk and benefit just about right, although 1 in 5 felt that risks were stressed too much, and 3 in 10 thought benefits were overstressed.
More than half of people (57.8 percent) said that physicians were their main source of healthcare information. A little over 1 in 10 (11.2 percent) found their main healthcare information on the internet, 7.9 percent asked a pharmacist, and 23.1 percent got their information elsewhere.
Leave a Reply
Your comments are welcome. However, specific medical advice will not be provided. Generic QUESTIONS can be directed to our Answer Line team at http://fightcolorectalcancer.org/awareness/answer-line or by calling us at 1-877-427-2111 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM Eastern time, Monday – Friday. We urge you to consult with a qualified physician for diagnosis and for answers to your personal questions. Fight Colorectal Cancer is not responsible for the medical accuracy of any comments left by persons other than Fight Colorectal Cancer staff members. Fight Colorectal Cancer staff members monitor comments and may respond publicly where appropriate.
Please note that we automatically publish the name that you enter next to your post. Also note that our pages are automatically indexed by Google and other search engines, and your name may therefore appear in search results on those sites. So if you wish to remain anonymous please use a different name or enter 'Anon' as the name.
We regret that we are unable to privately answer questions left as comments. So please do not include your phone number, email or mailing address in the body of your comment.