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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 6531

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: news

What drug companies know
Consumer Reports 1994 Oct631


Abstract:

To support their marketing programs, drug companies are soliciting patient lists from physicians and pharmacists. Thye also compile huge mailing lists through package inserts, mailings, and magazine and television ads that offer information about medications to people who call or write. At least one major mailing-list broker is gather the names of the ill and Metromail has a 15 million-name list of patients that it markets to the pharmaceutical industry.

Keywords:
*news story/United States/DTCA/direct-to-consumer advertising/mailing lists/patients/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER ADVERTISING/PROMOTIONAL TECHNIQUES: COMPILING PATIENT MAILING LISTS

 

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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