Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4430

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

Stallings S.
From printing press to pharmaceutical representative: a social history of drug advertising and promotion
Journal of Drug Issues 1992; 22:205-219

Abstract:

With only a few yeas left in the twentieth century, a multiplicity of controversies encompass drug advertising and promotion. Have marketing techniques regarding pharmaceutical drugs, proprietary medicines, alcohol and tobacco really chaned over time and disrupted the value structure of society? Past, present, and future affect people; not one aspect of time, but all aspects, bear upon the present. Drug advertising and promotion has maintained vitality and robustness through time by promoting the public’s desire for a continuity of familiar and traditional health values. By using the nature of a perpetually changing environment, advertising has advanced drugs as symbols of health. Such symbolic activity has provided hope to people regarding their own power and control over pain and illness. Through time, drug advertising became institutionalized.

Keywords:
*analysis/social history/PROMOTION AND HEALTH NEEDS: SOCIAL HISTORY

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909