Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2959

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

Harrell GD, Lindsay CM.
Pharmaceutical marketing
1978; 69-90

Abstract:

The 1975 direct outlay for medical journal advertising, direct mail advertising and detailing was $508 million, most directly at doctors although some promotion was also aimed at dentists and pharmacists. Most work to date has investigated how marketing influences decisions about new drugs. Little is known about the effects on older products. Based on limited evidence, sales representatives and journal articles seem to be the most influential sources in keeping physicians informed. It appears that physicians use more information from noncommercial sources when the risk of prescribing increases. The cost of industry marketing is inherently high because of the large amount of documentation-regulatory and medical-needed to explain the products and because of the relatively high technological exchange of information, including a good deal of individualized service to the physician. Pharmaceutical marketing must be highly sensitive to social pressure and interests creating a sense of “self-regulationâ€ within many firms. Government regulations also impose a number of requirements on advertising and labeling.

Keywords:
*nonsystematic review/United States/promotion costs and volume/sales representatives/direct mail/journal advertisements/value of promotion/regulation of promotion/new drugs/safety & risk information/quality of information/doctors/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DETAILING/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DIRECT MAIL/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: JOURNAL ADVERTISEMENTS/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: PRESCRIBING, DRUG USE/PROMOTION AS A SOURCE OF INFORMATION: DOCTORS/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: DIRECT GOVERNMENT REGULATION/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: INDUSTRY SELF-REGULATION/VOLUME OF AND EXPENDITURE ON PROMOTION

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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