Direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription medication in New Zealand.

The last decade has seen increasing measures aimed at regulating the influence of 'Big Pharma' following a number of scandals relating to unethical marketing. Despite these international trends, New Zealand continues to tolerate direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription medication, a controversial pharmaceutical marketing strategy that has been prohibited in all but two countries in the industrialised world. While the pharmaceutical industry asserts that DTCA is informational and empowers consumers, in this viewpoint article we argue that DTCA is a heavily biased source of health information that favours representation of benefits over harms, and is associated with unnecessary prescribing, iatrogenic harm and increased costs to the taxpayer. In this paper, we show that DTCA provides unbalanced information to consumers who may misconstrue DTCA as public health messages, and fail to recognise inherent commercial bias. We describe how DTCA has been linked with inappropriate prescribing and overtreatment, with evidence indicating that patients request and receive specific medications in response to DTCA, even when treatment is not clinically indicated. This exposes patients to unnecessary adverse effects and iatrogenic harm, and increases costs for the health-care sector through the prescription of expensive branded medication. We use local examples to illustrate these points. New Zealand remains an outlier in allowing DTCA to continue which, in our view, is a controversial and harmful practice. The available evidence suggests that consumers and health care professionals are generally opposed to DTCA. Therefore, we believe that the New Zealand government should review its stance on DTCA.