Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4256

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: news

Purvis A.
Cheaper can be better
Time 1991 Mar 1835

Abstract:

Although TPA is more than 10 times as expensive as streptokinase the former is widely used in the United States for opening up blocked heart arteries. The reason for this use is the heavy promotional campaign by Genentech the makers of TPA. Genentech also refused to participate in a comparative study of its drug and allegedly told doctors to refuse to enter patients into the study.

Keywords:
*news story/United States/Genentech/quality of prescribing/doctors/consumer drug prices/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: MARKET SHARE/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: PLACEMENT OF JOURNAL ADS

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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