Since 2000, a range of international lawsuits, boycotts and criticism is directed to Novartis, world leader in pharmaceuticals and consumer health. Are they using ‘medical prevention’ to promote their products or is this just a genuine marketing campaign with a secret agenda?
The company started a so-called “information campaign” through television advertisements, patient folders, etc stimulating patients with onychomycosis (fungus of the nail) to visit their general practitioner. Nice and expensive gesture for the ‘public health’.
In fact, it’s an inventive marketing strategy to bypass the law against drug-advertising, to sell it’s own product, called lamisil. With their misleading statement and the hideous monster of the TV-spot, they provoke mass-fear within the population to increase indirectly their sales. At the same time, GPs are pressured to prescribe lamisil and lamisil only by Novartis representatives. All other links with the company are carefully hidden.
All around Europe, courts decided that Novartis’s campaign did not violate laws prohibiting advertising of prescribed drugs, as neither Novartis nor terbinafine (molecule of lamisil) were specifically named. So the campaign is relaunched again and again, despite of the huge criticism of the GPs, consumer organizations and the state. And of course the taxpayer is affected again, while lamisil is partially reimbursed.
Their bypass solution has meanwhile been copied by other companies: in order to reach the consumer on a direct manner, just sell the disease!
Ye-hey it’s ‘happy hour’ again! Let’s all consume prescription drugs !
Read ‘Dutch GPs call for ban on Novartis products’ on BMJ Journals
Read more on BMJ Journals
Read the Medinet source
Read about it on SweetLove
Publication by the Belgian Senate about who’s resposible
Read more on EPO.Be
Research and writing by Talie Van Hecke. Talie is a medical representative in the field of dermatology and adivses products to GPs and dermatologists.