Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1451

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

Beales JH 3rd, MacLeod WC.
Assessments of pharmaceutical advertisements: a critical analysis of the criticism.
Food Drug Law J 1995; 50:(3):415-49

Abstract:

There has been no demonstration that there is a serious problem with pharmaceutical advertising or a flaw in the FDA’s performance in protecting against misleading advertising. The most significant survey of pharmaceutical advertising to date, the Wilkes study, failed to report results with generally accepted levels of significance. Given the current evidence, it cannot be concluded that the nation’s physicians are being misled by pharmaceutical advertisements in medical journals. On one issue, there is widespread agreement, which the Wilkes study’s authors share: pharmaceutical advertising delivers important information to physicians, who can put this information to work healing patients. Unless and until it can be demonstrated that an advertisement misleads physicians, the information it communicates should not be suppressed by reviewers.

Keywords:
*analysis United States journal advertisements Food and Drug Administration FDA value of promotion regulation of promotion industry perspective ATTITUDES REGARDING PROMOTION: INDUSTRY EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: JOURNAL ADVERTISEMENTS REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: DIRECT GOVERNMENT REGULATION

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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