Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2491

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

Bonaccorso S, Sturchio J.
Direct to consumer advertising is medicalising normal human experience: Against
BMJ 2002 Apr 13; 324:(7342):910-911
http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/324/7342/910

Abstract:

Medicalisation, the encouragement of healthy people to seek unnecessary medical treatment for life’s normal vicissitudes, has been used as an argument against direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA). However, many diseases are underdiagnosed and undertreated, and noncompliance is common. Informing patients can enhance doctor-patient relationships and improve health outcomes. Patients have a right to the information they need to make informed choices about their health.

Keywords:
*analysis United States Europe DTCA direct-to-consumer advertising medicalisation pharmaceutical industry Merck response to criticism underdiagnosis undertreatment noncompliance information asymmetry INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: CONSUMERS AND PATIENTS INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: DOCTOR-PATIENT RELATIONSHIP PROMOTION AS A SOURCE OF INFORMATION: CONSUMERS AND PATIENTS PROMOTIONAL TECHNIQUES: DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER ADVERTISING

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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