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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18205

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

Edwards J
Infomercial Disorder: Discovery's Female-Libido 'Documentary' Backed By Female Sex-Pill Maker
BNet 2010 Jun 14
http://industry.bnet.com/pharma/10008549/discovery-channels-documentary-on-female-sexual-disorder-is-really-an-infomercial-for-boerhingers-new-sex-pill-for-women/


Full text:

Boehringer Ingelheim has quietly persuaded the Discovery Channel to repeatedly run a “documentary” about Female Sexual Dysfunction that feels like an infomercial for flibanserin, the company’s sex pill for women that’s up for a crucial vote at the FDA on June 18. The documentary ran on three occasions in May and can be seen in four parts on Discovery’s web site (one, two, three and four).

Although the film begins by stating “This patient education program was produced with the support of funding from Boehringer Ingelheim,” and the company discloses the same information on its SexBrainBody.com site, the actual content of the film doesn’t make it clear that Boehringer is promoting a new pill for low libido in women or that there’s a controversy over whether FSD even exists.

Historically, drug company involvement in filmmaking has been controversial. Centocor, the Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) unit that markets the anti-inflammatory Remicade, launched a documentary titled “Innerstate” which followed three patients but didn’t mention the drug. Although Centocor was upfront about its backing of the movie, some still felt that it was misleading to call the film a “documentary” when the only reason it existed was because a company wanted to promote its drugs.

That appears to be the situation with “Understanding Female Sexual Desire,” the Discovery show. While some of the issues it raises are legit – why should older women who want their sex lives back not explore medical options? – the entire program is biased. It’s essentially one long justification for the existence of FSD and the supposed “female Viagra” cure.

Boehringer appears to be hoping that the show will lay some sympathetic groundwork for the patients who might benefit from the drug. But it isn’t being completely transparent about how it’s doing that. The disclosures look like those “Funding provided by …” interstitials you often see on PBS, where the assumption is that the editorial content was divorced from the cash. And if Boehringer really wanted people to draw the link between their pre-approval promotion of flibanserin and the Discovery show, it would have touted the move in its press releases, which make no mention of the programming.

 

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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