The potential of DTC advertising

摘要

Speaking at a symposium on "Consumerism" on 3 September, Dr Hubertus Cranz director-general of the Association of the European Self-Medication Industry, Belgium, stated that the increase in direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising has the potential to make a major impact on use of medicines and health care services, and is highly debated globally. The United States could be looked at as a test case. There, the first debates about DTC advertising were in the early 1980s and the first television commercial for a medicine appeared in 1987, although up to the mid 1990s DTC advertising was mainly print promotion. There has been major growth in DTC advertising in the past two to three years and an estimated US