Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11600

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

Moynihan R.
Healthcare giant advertises to children in classrooms
BMJ 2007 Sep 29; 335:(7621):637
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/short/335/7621/637-b?etoc

Abstract:

The multinational drug and medical device manufacturer Johnson & Johnson has been advertising its products in a resource book used by children in Australian classrooms.

The book, BodyWhys, is sponsored by Johnson & Johnson and contains several advertisements for Johnson & Johnson products, including tampons, sanitary pads, toothbrushes, and pimple cream.

Along with the advertisements, BodyWhys, which was recently distributed to 10 year old children in a state school in Sydney’s wealthy eastern suburbs, contains text about personal development.

Johnson & Johnson says it has been sending copies of the book to schools on request for several years. This year more than 130 private and public schools across Australia have received copies.

Johnson & Johnson, which began life as a producer of surgical dressings in the 1880s, now boasts annual sales of $53bn (£26bn; 38bn) and profits of $11bn. Controlling more than 250 operating companies, it now . . .

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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