Very nice. Each of these is good in its own way but in my eyes the last one kind of stands out because:
I think I'll end up getting her this one and recommending the others.
I can't thank you enough.
No, I really do not think so. I work in pharma marketing and while we don't do much DTC marketing (we focus on HCP), I can tell you that agencies aren't really taking that seriously. The logic behind that move doesn't even ad up - they say the cost of pharmaceuticals are so high because marketing is such a huge part of their budget. The assumption there I guess is that if they weren't allowed to do DTC marketing, then medications would be less expensive. First of all, I forget where, but I recently learned that DTC isn't even where most pharma marketing money goes - it's primarily HCP marketing and MedEd. Second, the vast majority of the cost to produce a drug is in the development and approval of the drug (which can sometimes take up to 20 years before a drug is FDA approved and hits the market, not to mention the millions of millions of dollars to simply get to approval, before any money is even spent on mass production and marketing).
Now, I'm not entirely sure why the AMA is taking this stance, but my opinion here is that the healthcare industry as a whole is on the cusp of being flipped on its ass. Read a book called The Patient Will See You Now. Link Here. Consumers are increasingly taking more control over their healthcare and treatment options. For far too long, one reason that healthcare has been so expensive is because we have always accepted medical professionals to be the ultimate authority of how we receive treatment. The general opinion has been that we simply cannot know better than the doctors, so we are better off just doing as they say. And when that's the public opinion, and an accepted one, medical professionals can and have been charging a high price for their services. So the more information consumers have about their options, and the more empowered they feel about taking more control over their healthcare, the less money that gets funneled into the unreasonable aspects of healthcare costs. Now I'm hesitant to make this sound too much like a conspiracy theory, but the less informed consumers are, the less power they have. DTC advertising, while annoying, is still a form of informing the public of their treatment options. (and remember, I don't work on the DTC side, I have no gain in supporting DTC - if anything such a ban would benefit my career). Some edits made here to grammar.
The thing I hate about these small, obscure subs is that I never see the posts until - in this case - 14 hours later.