ABSTRACT
Today’s consumers 1 encounter direct to consumer advertising (DTCA), or “any promotional effort by a pharmaceutical company to present prescription drug information to the general public and the lay media,” more than any other type of health communication (Huh, DeLorme, and Reid 2005: 569; Kuehn 2010). Statistics regarding DTCA exposure and expenditures are staggering. In 2008, sales of the top 15 prescriptions surpassed $290 billion, meaning that every dollar spent on DTCA generated $4.20 in increased sales, outpacing the return of even the fast food industry (Howard 2009; Weintraub 2007). Doctors wrote 164 million prescriptions for antidepressants in 2008, with the number of consumers taking these products doubling since 2000 (“Depression: Pharmaceutical Direct” 2010). Although some still debate how much these statistics can be linked directly to DTCA (Winstein 2008), the web now provides a new frontier in populating the health information landscape.
