Publicidade de medicamentos nos comerciais de TV: ética e legislação em defesa da saúde do consumidor

Abstract

The present research analyzes the importance of the observance of Law and the reflection about ethics to medicine’s advertising. It aims to stimulate the respect for consumer’s health. It broaches the historic importance of disseminate medicines to the development of the advertising market in Brazil. It relates the construction and the aspects of Law about the exposure of remedies. It presents the characteristics of advertising language to use in health drugs’ ads. It discusses the role of advertising in encouraging the irrational use of pharmaceuticals and in high rates of drug poisoning. It also highlights the need of ethical criteria for conducting a more responsible disclosure. It assesses the actual context for ads of the medical OTC drugs announced in the broadcast television regarding compliance of the legislation previously described, regarding advertising language and regarding compliance with the consumer in their right to reliable information of the characteristics of the advertised product. The reports are built through literary revision of authors that talk over ethics and publicity of medicines, like Bueno, Marcondes, Nascimento, Jesus, Temporão, Zuniga, Murta and Lefèvre. This is a research that is performed through the quantitative and qualitative methods in order to build the framework for analyzing the behavior of medicines’ advertising during the study. The instrument for data collection was the non participatory observation, through the elaboration of a script for observation of TV commercials aired on primetime TV. So, the research identified that the criteria used for publicity in order to comply with the laws require more rigorous and ethical reflection in order to achieve improvements over the care of the public’s health and over the social responsibility transmitted ‘or not’ by the brand that is disclosed.