ArticleAmerican journal of public health2011
The inverse benefit law: how drug marketing undermines patient safety and public health.
Article in American journal of public health, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Effectiveness of an intervention designed to optimize statins use: a primary prevention randomized clinical trial.BMC family practice · 2014Trial
- The Primary Care Medical Record Industry in Canada and Its Data Collection and Commercialization Practices.JAMA network open · 2025Article
- Are Corporations Re-Defining Illness and Health? The Diabetes Epidemic, Goal Numbers, and Blockbuster Drugs.Journal of bioethical inquiry · 2021Review
- Direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription medications: what the Canadian medical trainee needs to know.Canadian medical education journal · 2019Article
- Benefits, benefits, once more benefits... with no risk? Stop overlooking the harms of medicines.European journal of clinical pharmacology · 2018Review
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- Article
- Acute Kidney Injury in Elderly Patients With Chronic Kidney Disease: Do Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme Inhibitors Carry a Risk?Journal of clinical hypertension (Greenwich, Conn.) · 2016Article
- Effects of Televised Direct-to-Consumer Advertising for Varenicline on Prescription Dispensing in the United States, 2006-2009.Nicotine & tobacco research : official journal of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco · 2016Article
- Evaluating Public Health Interventions: 1. Examples, Definitions, and a Personal Note.American journal of public health · 2016Article
- Trends in exposure to televised prescription drug advertising, 2003-2011.American journal of preventive medicine · 2015Article
- Climate change, human health, and epidemiological transition.Preventive medicine · 2015Review
- The evolution of Reference Drug Lists and Clinical Practice Guidelines in the public health system of a middle-income country.British journal of clinical pharmacology · 2014Article
- The pursuit of preventive care for chronic illness: turning healthy people into chronic patients.Sociology of health & illness · 2014Article
- Personalised medicine, disease prevention, and the inverse care law: more harm than benefit?European journal of epidemiology · 2014Article
- Content analysis of false and misleading claims in television advertising for prescription and nonprescription drugs.Journal of general internal medicine · 2014Article
- Expanding disease definitions in guidelines and expert panel ties to industry: a cross-sectional study of common conditions in the United States.PLoS medicine · 2013Article
- Article
- Nation-scale adoption of new medicines by doctors: an application of the Bass diffusion model.BMC health services research · 2012Article
- Evidence, values, guidelines and rational decision-making.Journal of general internal medicine · 2012Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Recent highly publicized withdrawals of drugs from the market because of safety concerns raise the question of whether these events are random failures or part of a recurring pattern. The inverse benefit law, inspired by Hart's inverse care law, states that the ratio of benefits to harms among patients taking new drugs tends to vary inversely with how extensively the drugs are marketed. The law is manifested through 6 basic marketing strategies: reducing thresholds for diagnosing disease, relying on surrogate endpoints, exaggerating safety claims, exaggerating efficacy claims, creating new diseases, and encouraging unapproved uses. The inverse benefit law highlights the need for comparative effectiveness research and other reforms to improve evidence-based prescribing.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.