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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1409

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

Wal-Mart To Offer Free Diabetes Screenings at 2,900 Stores Nationwide
kaisernetwork.org 2003 Aug 29


Full text:

Wal-Mart on Sept. 6 will offer free diabetes screenings at all of its 2,900 stores nationwide, the Wall Street Journal reports. Certified health screeners will administer the two-minute test — which normally costs between $15 and $30 — and will encourage people with above-normal blood-sugar levels to see their doctors. An estimated 17 million Americans have diabetes, but about 33% of them are undiagnosed, according to the American Diabetes Foundation. Wal-Mart stores will also use the event to promote health care and food products targeted at people with diabetes, spokesperson Danette Thomson said (Wall Street Journal, 8/29).

 

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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