- Title
- Pharmaceutical promotion and consumers: unpacking the assumptions
- Creator
- Hogue, Marie-Clare
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- Currently Australia’s pharmaceutical promotion policy bans direct to consumer advertising (DTCA) of pharmaceuticals. Policies however, are not static but are open to change as the relative influence of stakeholders, and ideas about appropriate policy objectives change. Australia’s ban on DTCA ostensibly reflects the primacy of safety and the belief among regulators that consumers are susceptible to negative effects of drug promotion. Critics of drug promotion, however, believe that despite the ban on DTCA, current regulation still allows some forms of drug promotion aimed at consumers. Promotion that circumvents the ban, some of which can be characterised as ‘disease mongering’ results in a situation where people reach for ‘a pill for every ill’. An opposing view of drug promotion to consumers is that of the ‘expert patient’ which asserts that people are better informed and more critically aware regarding conditions and treatments than they are given credit for. On this view, drug promotion to consumers can enhance and empower people in their medicine related decisions and improve under-diagnosis and poor compliance. The opposing views offer different ideas about consumers and their social context. There has to date been only limited empirical investigation of either view. In the research undertaken for this thesis, I started by looking more closely at what critics claimed made drug promotion to Australian consumers worthy of being further restricted. In ‘unpacking’ the disease mongering critique through looking at the literature and interviewing critics of drug promotion, I discerned three main ideas in the rationale for further restrictions: the potency of drug promotion, the hubris of doctors and the susceptibility of consumers. I then situated the ideas of critics into emerging sociological ideas. Disease mongering and the critique of drug promotion generally can be subsumed into a broader thesis about the role of pharmaceuticals in contemporary society – ‘pharmaceuticalisation’. Pharmaceuticalisation theory asserts that pharmaceuticals have become a pervasive and dominant presence, to the point that people now possess a ‘pharmaceutical imagination’. Pharmaceuticalisation theorists see drug promotion as a central but not sole factor in creating the dominant role that pharmaceuticals have come to play in health behaviours. Broader social processes and socio-technological factors such as medicalisation, consumerism and regulatory ideology also play an important part. Despite some claims that it is a descriptive concept, there is a strong normative element in pharmaceuticalisation that reflects a quite profound ambivalence towards pharmaceuticals in society. The implications of pharmaceuticalisation for Australia’s regulation of drug promotion policy is that a policy focused on banning DTCA, but not attending to factors such as consumerism is unlikely to be adequate to minimise inappropriate pharmaceutical demand.
- Subject
- pharmaceuticals; consumer advertising; drug promotion
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/937246
- Identifier
- uon:12531
- Rights
- Copyright 2013 Marie-Clare Hogue
- Language
- eng
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