Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3135

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

Avorn J, Soumerai SB.
A new approach to reducing suboptimal drug use.
JAMA 1983 Oct 7; 250:(13):1752-3

Abstract:

(Limited to parts of article dealing with promotion.) After medical school for most physicians, drug education is heavily dominated by the promotional efforts of the pharmaceutical industry. So sophisticated and effective are these efforts that it is easly to forget that their main purpose is to increase product sales.

Keywords:
*editorial/United States/source of information/doctors/continuing medical education/ATTITUDES REGARDING PROMOTION: HEALTH PROFESSIONALS/PROMOTION AS A SOURCE OF INFORMATION: DOCTORS Anti-Bacterial Agents/administration & dosage* Child Cost-Benefit Analysis Drug Information Services Humans Prescriptions, Drug/economics*

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Cases of wilful misrepresentation are a rarity in medical advertising. For every advertisement in which nonexistent doctors are called on to testify or deliberately irrelevant references are bunched up in [fine print], you will find a hundred or more whose greatest offenses are unquestioning enthusiasm and the skill to communicate it.

The best defence the physician can muster against this kind of advertising is a healthy skepticism and a willingness, not always apparent in the past, to do his homework. He must cultivate a flair for spotting the logical loophole, the invalid clinical trial, the unreliable or meaningless testimonial, the unneeded improvement and the unlikely claim. Above all, he must develop greater resistance to the lure of the fashionable and the new.
- Pierre R. Garai (advertising executive) 1963