How drug companies try to get inside your head

Date: 04 Oct. 2008

Unless you are a doctor or a pharmacist, the terms methylphenidate and sildenafil probably don't mean much to you. It is a fair bet that fluoxetine, oseltamivir and trastuzumab will also draw a blank. Yet these tongue- twisting generic names are staples of the health pages. You have read dozens of stories about them.

Call them something else, and all becomes clear. Methylphenidate is better known as Ritalin, the common treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Sildenafil is Viagra. Fluoxetine is the antidepressant Prozac, oseltamivir is the flu drug Tamiflu, and trastuzumab is Herceptin, the breast cancer therapy.

These proprietary names are more memorable for a reason: each was developed at a cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds. The snappy, consonant-heavy epithets that appear on medical labels are elaborate pharmaceutical company marketing, designed to persuade doctors and patients to recall and choose their products over those of their rivals.

This week a group of American doctors argued that the media is too complicit in this commercial strategy. An analysis of US health news reporting led by Michael Hochman, of Harvard Medical School, found that two thirds of articles described drugs mainly by brand name.

Source: http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/body_and_soul/article4874955.ece