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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15082

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

Loewenberg S.
Sidney Wolfe
The Lancet 2009 Feb 14; 373:(9663):537
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2809%2960189-6/fulltext


Abstract:

I am not surprised when Sidney Wolfe declines my invitation to one of Washington, DC’s fancy eateries. He is too busy for such frivolity, and besides, they will be so populated with lobbyists and politicos that he would not feel comfortable talking freely. Instead, we walk across the street from his office to a gourmet takeaway, where he picks out some roast turkey breast, Greek yogurt, and a fruit salad.
For the past 37 years, Wolfe has been the scourge of the drug industry and a leading cri …

 

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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