It's not that strange for new medications. Here's a personal example.
Lots of people suffer from hyperhidrosis, which is excessive sweating, generally on the palms, feet, or armpits, where sweat glands are clustered.
There have never been great treatments. There are all sorts of them, but many of them just don't work, or have horrific side effects.
Among these is a drug called glycopyrronium bromide, which is an anticholinergic. Taken orally, it absolutely cures hyperhidrosis dead in its tracks. It also has a tendency to dry up every part of your body that should naturally be lubricated in some way.
Imagine your mouth, tongue and throat so dry you can barely form the movements necessary to speak. Imagine your eyes so dry you can barely blink. Imagine your nose dry and cracking and frequently bleeding.
Lots of people would have talked to their physicians about this in the past, and lots of people would have tried options available to solve the problem, including surgical options. But all of those options were either terrible, or did little to alleviate the fundamental problem.
And then in 2018 there was a new treatment developed, qbrexza, essentially the same drug, but delivered as a topical cloth treatment. It turns out this drug is not readily absorbed into the surrounding bloodstream, and in any event doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier at all. It turns out that topical treatment works quite well for the primary purpose, with significantly reduced side effects.
But imagine you've already talked to your doctor about this problem, years ago, tried several remedies, and none of them worked. Imagine you had already given up on seeking treatment.
Then you see an advertisement on TV for your particular affliction. It sounds like a new, and promising avenue of treatment. And so you decide to go back to your doctor, and ask about this new treatment, which never existed before. And you never would have done that, probably ever, if you hadn't seen the advertisement.
How many drug advertisements do you see for old drugs? Not that many. There are some, for very common ailments like hypertension. But primarily drug advertisements are focused on new drugs.
It's not that odd to advertise a new treatment. There are still doctors that need to evaluate patients and prescribe the medication. If doctors are prescribing useless medication to patients, that seems like the primary problem to me, not the advertisements.
> And so you decide to go back to your doctor, and ask about this new treatment, which never existed before. And you never would have done that, probably ever, if you hadn't seen the advertisement.
This should be your doctor's job when you go for annual checkups. If you don't go for annual checkups, you shouldn't be surprised that your health choices are falling out of date.
>This should be your doctor's job when you go for annual checkups.
How would you know to ask the doctor about it during your annual check-up, if you aren't aware of the existence of the drug? As others have mentioned already, doctors do not tend to track every single new medication for every possible little condition that their patients could have. And even if they physically could do that (not sure if it is actually possible), do you think they would, just like every web developer would keep track of every new little framework/tool that gets released and could potentially serve their needs better?
> How would you know to ask the doctor about it during your annual check-up, if you aren't aware of the existence of the drug?
I don't rely on business users asking me about technical solutions to their problems based on advertisements they've seen, and I'm not in a field with as much required specialized prerequisite and continuing education and mandated licensing as medicine.
Now, certainly there are patients that meaningfully contribute by, e.g., actually doing deep dives in the scientific literature related to their diagnosis and related treatments, and bringing questions and references derived from that research to their doctor, which really does cover things at a level that the average practitioner might not be aware of for a particular conditjo . But the kind of ads in popular media are of marginal if any value to them.
> As others have mentioned already, doctors do not tend to track every single new medication for every possible little condition that their patients could have.
They are bombarded with even more aggressive marketing than the public is for any of the ones that are spending money on public ads, so even if there is a real issue here, public-facing drug ads are not directed at solving it.
Your doctor knows all the medications you take as well as what conditions you suffer from, when you describe that you still suffer from side effects they will update you on the latest medications.
As far as "they do not track" , they are supposed to. That's a failing on the doctor's part but putting the patients in charge based on paid TV advertisements for what is actually an extremely narrow portion of available drugs is not the solution.
Maybe there's a gap for some kind of doctor-patient communication application? The idea is a new drug like this comes out and a doctor can go into their system and send some notification to their patients
Lots of people suffer from hyperhidrosis, which is excessive sweating, generally on the palms, feet, or armpits, where sweat glands are clustered.
There have never been great treatments. There are all sorts of them, but many of them just don't work, or have horrific side effects.
Among these is a drug called glycopyrronium bromide, which is an anticholinergic. Taken orally, it absolutely cures hyperhidrosis dead in its tracks. It also has a tendency to dry up every part of your body that should naturally be lubricated in some way.
Imagine your mouth, tongue and throat so dry you can barely form the movements necessary to speak. Imagine your eyes so dry you can barely blink. Imagine your nose dry and cracking and frequently bleeding.
Lots of people would have talked to their physicians about this in the past, and lots of people would have tried options available to solve the problem, including surgical options. But all of those options were either terrible, or did little to alleviate the fundamental problem.
And then in 2018 there was a new treatment developed, qbrexza, essentially the same drug, but delivered as a topical cloth treatment. It turns out this drug is not readily absorbed into the surrounding bloodstream, and in any event doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier at all. It turns out that topical treatment works quite well for the primary purpose, with significantly reduced side effects.
But imagine you've already talked to your doctor about this problem, years ago, tried several remedies, and none of them worked. Imagine you had already given up on seeking treatment.
Then you see an advertisement on TV for your particular affliction. It sounds like a new, and promising avenue of treatment. And so you decide to go back to your doctor, and ask about this new treatment, which never existed before. And you never would have done that, probably ever, if you hadn't seen the advertisement.
How many drug advertisements do you see for old drugs? Not that many. There are some, for very common ailments like hypertension. But primarily drug advertisements are focused on new drugs.
It's not that odd to advertise a new treatment. There are still doctors that need to evaluate patients and prescribe the medication. If doctors are prescribing useless medication to patients, that seems like the primary problem to me, not the advertisements.