Ethics and Accessibility to Knowledge in Prescription Drug Commercials in the USA

Abstract

Direct-To-Consumer Advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs in the USA is authorized and controlled by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that issues guidelines and limitations to the communication of such drugs. This study investigates the discourse that renders the perception of the disease’s knowledge, the accessibility to information on the condition and on the drug, and the way the roles of the physician and of the patients are conveyed in the commercials aired on TV in the USA. The diseases range from diabetes to some forms of cancer, cholesterol control, heart diseases and depression and more. The corpus consists of 72 commercials, from 2001 to 2019, advertising different drugs. The analysis is carried out, on the one hand, on the way the linguistic strategies lead promotional discourse: it intertwines and aligns with the sensitiveness of the underlying product’s selling point. On the other hand, the investigation focuses, in particular, on the role of physicians, revealing interesting aspects in terms of an implicit loss of their scientific independence in the treatment of the diagnosis.