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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 9984

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

Lexchin J.
Who Should Own the Presses?
Israeli Journal of Emergency Medicine 2006 May; 6:(2):3-5
http://www.isrjem.org/Lexchin.Editorial.proof2.pdf


Abstract:

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I dabbled in university student journalism, one of the more political slogans making the rounds went something like “Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.” These days the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) and its subsidiary CMA Media seem determined to prove that this saying is true with respect to the CMAJ


Notes:

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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