Healthy Skepticism Library item: 19044

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

Larson RJ, Woloshin S, Schwartz LM, Welch HG.
Celebrity endorsements of cancer screening.
J Natl Cancer Inst 2005 Feb 18; 97:(9):693-5
http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/97/9/693.long

Abstract:

Celebrities often promote cancer screening by relating personal anecdotes about their own diagnosis or that of a loved one. We used data obtained from a random-digit dialing survey conducted in the United States from December 2001 through July 2002 to examine the extent to which adults of screening age without a history of cancer had seen or heard or been influenced by celebrity endorsements of screening mammography, prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing, or sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy. The survey response rate was 72% among those known to be eligible and 51% among potentially eligible people accounting for those who could not be contacted. A total of 360 women aged 40 years or older and 140 men aged 50 years or older participated in the survey. Most respondents reported they “had seen or heard a celebrity talk about” mammography (73% of women aged 40 years or older), PSA testing (63% of men aged 50 years or older), or sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy (52% of adults aged 50 years or older). At least one-fourth of respondents who had seen or heard a celebrity endorsement said that the endorsement made them more likely to undergo mammography (25%), PSA testing (31%), or sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy (37%).

Keywords:
Adult Breast Neoplasms/prevention & control Colonoscopy Colorectal Neoplasms/prevention & control Famous Persons* Female Humans Male Mammography Mass Screening*/psychology Mass Screening*/statistics & numerical data Middle Aged Neoplasms/diagnosis Neoplasms/prevention & control* Prostate-Specific Antigen/blood Prostatic Neoplasms/prevention & control Sigmoidoscopy United States

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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