When advertising creates a demand and the population does not have financial accountability for that demand, there are economic problems. That puts the pharmacist smack in the middle of two powerful forces, pharmaceutical manufacturers who are spending a billion dollars to promote brand-name products, and health plans that are trying very hard to encourage use of generics to lower their drug costs. The answer to that question speaks to the nature of pharmacist training. They can relate to the patient the fact that there's more information beyond the advertising. There are many other medications that pharmacists have familiarity with.
Pharmacists can also attempt to influence physicians.
When patients come in for widely advertised drugs, pharmacists can effectively counter-advertise the drugs that are on the formulary and provide useful information to the physician, particularly with respect to relative costs. To be effective in that role of talking about the formulary drug or countering the advertising message, there must be a relationship of trust between the pharmacist and the patient. That must be more difficult these days given the number of pharmacy chains that have been bought or merged. It could potentially be a problem. I would tend to think that plans and pharmacy-delivery systems should be able to communicate this issue of building relationships with members.