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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 8958

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

Carey B.
Panel to Weigh Expansion Of Antidepressant Warnings
New York Times 2006 Dec 13A30
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30912FD3E550C708DDDAB0994DE404482&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fPeople%2fC%2fCarey%2c%20Benedict


Abstract:

Public health officials, psychiatrists, grieving parents and outraged former patients will fill a hotel ballroom in Silver Spring, Md., this morning to argue the most bitterly divisive question in psychiatry: do the drugs that doctors prescribe to relieve depression make some people more likely to attempt suicide? The hearing, called by the Food and Drug Administration, will be the first time a government panel has addressed the question since 2004, when impassioned testimony resulted in the…

 

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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