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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 19972

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Appleton DR
Cross Words
BMJ 1994 Dec 24; 309:1737
http://www.bmj.com/content/309/6970/1737


Abstract:

Seal up the mouth of outrage for a while, Till we can clear these ambiguities—Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

As a fairly compulsive crossword solver, I derive a great deal of enjoyment from the wonderful double meanings and grammatical contortions in the English language. A clue in a crossword which I saw the other day hinged on the metal cap protecting a sewer being not a manhole cover but a thimble. Another merely said “Beach wear. (7,7)” and the answer, instead of being BATHING COSTUME, was COASTAL EROSION. For some reason it pleases me that you can have a catch in your voice while giving voice to a catch, and a good catch in the nets might mean quite different things to anglers and cricketers. Prepositions can be used in so many different ways that you can, for instance, treat patients with piles or with pills. All these features of the language add to the richness not only of informal conversation but of literature—think of Dylan Thomas’s “sloe-black, slow, black, crow-black … sea.”

Ximenes (not the one from the Spanish Inquisition, but the one who composed crosswords) said that a good clue only had to say what it meant —it did not need to mean what it said. But when people wish to impart information they have to avoid ambiguities, even if one interpretation is more likely than another. A radio announcer who talks of silent film music might be given the benefit of the …

 

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Cases of wilful misrepresentation are a rarity in medical advertising. For every advertisement in which nonexistent doctors are called on to testify or deliberately irrelevant references are bunched up in [fine print], you will find a hundred or more whose greatest offenses are unquestioning enthusiasm and the skill to communicate it.

The best defence the physician can muster against this kind of advertising is a healthy skepticism and a willingness, not always apparent in the past, to do his homework. He must cultivate a flair for spotting the logical loophole, the invalid clinical trial, the unreliable or meaningless testimonial, the unneeded improvement and the unlikely claim. Above all, he must develop greater resistance to the lure of the fashionable and the new.
- Pierre R. Garai (advertising executive) 1963