Healthy Skepticism Library item: 5719

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

Bardelay D.
French doctors report on sales representatives’ visits
Essential Drugs Monitor 199421

Abstract:

Since 1991, la revue Prescrire has coordinated a network of general practitioners in France that has been reporting on interactions with sales representatives. Official indications of drugs are often extended or changed, the dosage sometimes does not correspond to the official recommendations and the drug side effects are rarely mentioned spontaneously.

Keywords:
*analytic survey/France/primary care doctors/sales representatives/quality of information//la revue Prescrire/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DETAILING

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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