Why educate health care professionals?
DDMAC’s traditional surveillance activities have been somewhat limited by its inability to monitor drug promotion in settings such as physician offices, local dinner programs, and promotional speaker training sessions. By raising awareness about misleading promotion and providing an easy process for reporting it, FDA can gain the valuable assistance of health care professionals in helping to decrease the number of misleading promotional messages about prescription drugs. Is the program only for health care professionals? Anyone can submit a complaint to FDA. The Bad Ad Program is focused primarily on health care professionals. FDA also has an educational campaign designed to educate consumers about misleading direct-to-consumer (DTC) promotion. The program is called EthicAd and is web based. FDA notes that according to a recent Congressional Budget Office Brief [１], promotional spending on sales promotion to health care professionals outpaces DTC spending by almost 3 to 1. Therefore, t
