corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3240

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

Liebman M.
Prescription drug advertising to the general public.
Hosp Pract (Off Ed) 1984 May; 19:(5):13,


Abstract:

I recently reviewed materials provided by Pfizer on a public information program on TV and in consumer magazines. The ads alert viewers and readers to cancer, diabetes, hypertension, and coronary disease, emphasising the importance of medical care, and concluding with the message that Pfizer is a partner in healthcare. A much more dubious proposition is that the need for health education validates prescription drug advertising to the public, which Columbia Broadcasting Service seems to be fostering. CBS recently announced results of a nationwide study of consumer attitudes towards drug ads, and is frank that the study is designed to facilitate ads on its TV and radio outlets. Meanwhile, FDA is developing guidelines for such ads. It is expected that the guidelines will be issued soon, and the moratorium ended. The hope is that FDA, industry, and the public will not confuse ads with education. The medical profession cannot escape responsibility for failing to sufficiently engage in education. However, the AMA has launched a Patient Medication Instruction program to encourage physicians to give patients printed instruction leaflets with prescriptions. Doctors must educate patients about drugs they prescribe. They also need to improve communications with pharmacists. Together, individual doctors and medical organizations have a far better chance of educating the public than multi-million dollar TV advertising campaigns.

Keywords:
*editorial/United States/ Advertising* Drug Industry Drug Information Services* Health Education Humans United States

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








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