An Empirical Study on Gender-Age Influence on Direct-To-Consumer Promotion of Pharmaceutical Products

摘要

Health care, since time immemorial, has been treasured in an ethical bubble and rightly so because lack of ethics in health care can have devastating effects. One aspect of the ethics is to discourage access healthcare information to patients. The law does not permit access to healthcare information being shared with patients. Arrival of Internet-based technologies has disrupted this legal act completely. Today access to healthcare information is available to us online. It is found to have distinct positive aspects, despite the stigma it had earlier. How do people view it? Do their beliefs on the positive outcome of this access to healthcare information differ across age and gender? The questions have been answered based on this study. 400 patients were subjected to a test that measured their beliefs regarding the positive outcomes of access to healthcare information. It has been found low but significant differences across age and gender exist in this respect.