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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15972

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

TV Networks Fight Drug-Ad Measure
The Wall Street Journal 2009 Jul 10
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124719323157921305.html


Abstract:

Television networks and other media companies are rushing to try to quash a plan they say amounts to a tax on advertisements for prescription drugs.

The four major broadcast networks — Walt Disney Co.‘s ABC, CBS Corp., News Corp.‘s Fox and General Electric Co.‘s NBC Universal — told House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel (D., N.Y.) in a Thursday letter …

 

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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