Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1014
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
Keep Drug-Sponsored 'Patient Channel' Out of Hospitals, Doctors Say
Commerical Alert 2003 Feb 25
http://www.commercialalert.org/issues/health/drug-marketing/keep-drug-sponsored-patient-channel-out-of-hospitals-doctors-say
Full text:
Commercial Alert and 37 doctors and health professionals sent letters today
to the CEOs of all 60 US hospital chains with more than 2000 beds, asking
them not to carry General Electric’s new televised “Patient Channel,”
because it plays manipulative drug advertising to vulnerable patients in
their hospital beds.
General Electric aims to install the “Patient Channel” in 1,100 hospitals by
the end of 2003, according to Electronic Media.
The letters to the heads of hospital chains were written and organized by
Commercial Alert, a nonprofit organization that protects children and
communities from commercialism. The letter follows.
Dear __________:
In September, General Electric launched the Patient Channel, which shows
medical programming and drug ads to patients in hospitals and waiting rooms
across the country. The shows and ads run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The Patient Channel is essentially a marketing tool for the nation’s
pharmaceutical corporations. It was designed to give them access to a
captive audience at a time of maximum vulnerability and emotional distress.
In the studied euphemisms of the channel’s marketing director, Kelly
Peterson, the Patient Channel enables drug companies to “directly associate
their products with a particular condition in a hospital setting.”
In other words, pitch drugs to them at a time when they are most worried
about disease, in a way that carries the implicit authority and endorsement
of the hospital and its doctors. Two direct-to-consumer drug advertising
executives were more candid. “The ultimate goal of DTC advertising,” they
wrote, “is to stimulate consumers to ask their doctors about the advertised
drug and then, hopefully, get the prescription.”
“Consumers react emotionally,” another drug advertising executive explained,
“so you want to know how they feel about your message and what emotional
triggers will get them to act.. We want to identify the emotions we can tap
into to get that customer to take the desired course of action.”
It is no mystery why drug companies would covet this new system of
advertising delivery and emotional manipulation. It strains belief, however,
that hospitals would even consider playing host to it. Hospitals are in the
healing business, not the business of tapping the emotions of vulnerable
patients for the benefit of hucksters of pills. It is not their role to
deliver patients’ “share of mind” — in the revealing phrase of
Pharmaceutical Executive magazine — to these hucksters. To do so would give
whole new meaning to the term “Sick Hospital Syndrome.”
If you provide information to patients, it should be balanced, complete, and
unbiased. It should not be sales propaganda designed to push pills. Do you
really want to invite situations in which patients hear one thing from their
doctors and then get conflicting advice from their hospital TV? Does it need
saying that your doctors should be the guides to your patients’ health, and
not the advertising agencies that will craft the sales pitches on the
Patient Channel?
Pharmaceutical companies have an irremediable conflict of interest in any
information they provide to patients. Educating patients about possible
courses of treatment – sometimes about questions of life or death — is far
too important to be left to them.
We urge you to do the right thing. Maintain the integrity of your hospitals
and of the doctor-patient relationship. Just say no to this ad delivery
system called the Patient Channel, and keep it out of your hospitals.
Sincerely,
………………….
