Healthy Skepticism Library item: 6544

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

Health highlights of the 14th IOCU World Congress
HAI News 1994 Dec

Abstract:

Specific examples of misleading advertising showed that drug promotion is not about information, nor choice but persuasion. Developing countries have political, socio-economic and cultural factors that make controlling promotion difficult. Areas for further work were suggested.

Keywords:
*news story/quality of information/developing countries/consumer groups/ATTITUDES REGARDING PROMOTION: CONSUMERS/PATIENTS/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: GENERAL QUALITY OF INFORMATION/PROMOTION AND HEALTH NEEDS: PROMOTION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

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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