Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4186

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

Goldstein JH.
Doctoring medicine: reading between the lines of drug advertisements
Journal of Medical Humanities 1991; 12:(2):73-83

Abstract:

With the aid of techniques of art and literary criticism, the author investigates the ideological function of drug advertisements. He proposes that the deleterious effects of advertising practices on medical care extend beyond the usual level of critical awareness of physicians.

Keywords:
*analysis/journal advertisements/images in ads/regulation of promotion/Food and Drug Administration/FDA/ideology/monitoring of compliance/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: JOURNAL ADVERTISEMENTS/IMAGES IN PROMOTION: METHAPHORS/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: COMPLIANCE, SANCTIONS, STANDARDS/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: DIRECT GOVERNMENT REGULATION

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts

If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Announcements

PharmedOut’s annual conference: Missing The Target: When Practitioners Harm More Than Heal

No Free Lunch is merging with Healthy Skepticism

Conference program: Pharma Knows Best? Managing Medical Knowledge

Prescrire’s proposals for France’s national conference on medicines policy

Pharmed Out Conference ‘Pharma Knows Best? Managing Medical Knowledge’

More announcements

What's new on this site

Library Home

Library Search

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