Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17628

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

Corbett Dooren J
FDA Chides Glaxo for Cancer-Drug Ad
The Wall Street Journal 2010 Apr 16
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303491304575188501070131496.html

Abstract:

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday said an advertisement for a GlaxoSmithKline PLC cancer drug and a Web site for a bladder treatment the company co-promotes were “false or misleading.”

The agency also took issue with a consumer email from Novartis AG about its pain gel Voltaren.

Specifically, an advertisement that ran in a cancer medical journal involving Glaxo’s drug Arzerra omitted “important information about the drug’s safety and effectiveness,” the FDA said in a letter to the company that was posted on the agency’s Web site. Arzerra was approved in October to …

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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