Healthy Skepticism Library item: 6920

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

Ala-fossi N, Vilhunen S, Lilja J, Enlund H.
Promoting antidepressants to physicians in Finnish direct mail and journal advertisements
Journal of Social and Administrative Pharmacy 2000; 17:9-14

Abstract:

The contents of advertisements for new antidepressants appearing in the leading medical journal and direct mailings to physicians in Finland 1992-1993 and 1996-1997 were analyzed. A total of 135 journal advertisements and 71 direct mail advertisements were examined. Nine different new pharmacological substances and eleven different commercial brands were marketed during these two study periods. in direct mail advertisements contraindications, adverse effects and reimbursement status were significantly more often presented in the later study period compared with the earlier one (p<0.05). A strong correlation (r=0.955, p=0.001) was found between the number of advertisements in medical journals and the total sales of antidepressants. Promoting pharmacological characteristics of antidepressants as main arguments was found as a new trend. Direct mail was more professionally oriented than journal advertisements in 1996-97. In professional marketing presentation of scientific research, references, tables and opinion leaders plays an important role. The results of this study implies that drug companies had succeeded with different marketing strategies and the most important way of promoting the sales of drugs is the successful use of various promotional tools.

Keywords:
*content analysis/Finland/journal advertisements/direct mail/doctors/marketing strategies/safety & risk information/depression/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DETAILING/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: JOURNAL ADVERTISEMENTS/PROMOTION IN SPECIFIC THERAPEUTIC AREAS: PSYCHIATRIC DISEASES

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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