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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11140

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

Milk formula ads to be banned
6minutes (Australia) 2007 Aug 10
http://www.6minutes.com.au/dirplus/images/6minutes/newspluspharma/10_08_2007.pdf


Full text:

A government inquiry is considering a total ban on advertising of formulas to bring Australia into line with WHO guidelines.

The Standing Committee on Ageing and Health found the current voluntary code was not being upheld, and accused doctors of acting as “surrogate marketers” by giving out free infant formula sample packs.

The inquiry also advised funding a national network of breast milk banks, and removing GST on breast pumps.

 

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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