Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4658

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: report

HAI international meeting report: Open forum: promoting health or pushing drugs
Geneva: Health Action International 1993

Abstract:

Speeches given at a public meeting about promotion are summarized. The topics covered include: promotion as disinformation, an analysis of medical journal advertising in Peru, an overview of the problems with voluntary promotion codes in Canada, the results of a French survey on the information that sales representatives give to doctors, an account of trying to change marketing practices in Pakistan and the results of a pilot survey on the implementation of the World Health Organization’s Ethical Criteria for Medicinal Drug Promotion.

Keywords:
*analysis/regulation of promotion/journal advertisements/quality of information/WHO/World Health Organization//Ethical Criteria for Medicinal Drug Promotion/Pakistan/Peru/Canada/France/sales representatives/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DETAILING/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: JOURNAL ADVERTISEMENTS/PROMOTION AND HEALTH NEEDS: PROMOTION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: INDUSTRY SELF-REGULATION/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: INTERNATIONAL CODES

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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