Healthy Skepticism Library item: 660

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

Rapoport D.
Under the influence of the pharmaceutical industry? Kick the habit.
CMAJ 1995; 152:1043

Keywords:
*letter to the editor Canada consumer drug prices sponsored symposia & conferences continuing medical education controlled circulation journals promotional literature ATTITUDES REGARDING PROMOTION: HEALTH PROFESSIONALS PROMOTION DISGUISED: JOURNAL SUPPLEMENTS, CONTROLLED CIRCULATION JOURNALS AND NEWSLETTERS PROMOTION DISGUISED: PHYSICIAN EDUCATION MATERIAL AND GUIDELINES PROMOTION DISGUISED: SUPPORT FOR CME

Notes:

The author lists all of the different sponsored continuing medical education activities and all of the medical journals, sponsored and unsponsored, that he is exposed to. He concludes that the pharmaceutical industry should find less costly ways to promote its products and pass the savings on in the form of less costly drugs.

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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