Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3103

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

Cooperstock R, Hill J.
The effects of tranquillization: benzodiazepine use in Canada
Health and Welfare Canada 1982;

Abstract:

Prescribing of benzodiazepines can’t be understood without looking at the way that products are promoted. Sales representatives are a major source of prescribing information for doctors. However, companies regard the major role of detailers as sellers rather than educators. Journal advertisements tend to promote the extension of medical problems to encompass the stresses of daily living and to further the belief that certain illnesses must be coped with through continuous drug consumption. Ads also portray women in a very negative way.

Keywords:
*analysis/Canada/benzodiazepines/psychotropic drugs/sales representatives/quality of information/journal advertisements/images in ads/women/sexism/ medicalization of problems/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DETAILING/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: JOURNAL ADVERTISEMENTS/IMAGES IN PROMOTION: WOMEN/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: MEDICALIZATION OF PROBLEMS/PROMOTION AS A SOURCE OF INFORMATION: DOCTORS/PROMOTION IN SPECIFIC THERAPEUTIC AREAS: PSYCHIATRIC DISEASES

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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