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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 8388

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

Abbott B.
Getting your OTC campaign in shape
Pharmaceutical Executive 1984 Sep; 4:60, 62, 67


Abstract:

A questionnaire survey of 1500 women (aged 18-64) was carried out to determine their attitude toward self-medication, the OTC preparations purchased, the source of brand information influencing selection and confidence in the quality of the products. The study asked questions in 5 major categories of physical fitness: body care, diet and nutrition, vitamins, preventive and curative medicines and dental health. Results showed an increasing trend for self-medication, particularly among younger women. Older women tend to buy more generic products than the younger ones. Brand loyalties were mixed. Four out of 5 respondents think OTC drugs are as safe as prescription drugs. Several sources of information were identified; about half ask the advice of a physician. By paying attention to the tastes and habits of these health conscious women, guidelines for targeting advertising can be developed by manufacturers and retailers.

 

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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