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Healthy Skepticism’s Aims

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1. Improving health by reducing harm from inappropriate, misleading or unethical marketing of health products or services, especially misleading pharmaceutical promotion.

2. Investigating and communicating about marketing practices.

3. Promoting healthy skepticism about marketing practices via advocacy, research and education.

4. Developing, supporting and evaluating initiatives to reduce harmful marketing practices, including reform of regulations and incentives.

5. Developing, implementing and evaluating educational strategies to improve health care decision making, including evaluation of drug promotion.

6. Supporting compassionate, appropriate, sustainable, evidence-based health care*, provided according to need, for optimal health outcomes.

7. Providing practical opportunities to advance the aims of Healthy Skepticism Inc.

* Evidence-based health care means making decisions about how to promote health or provide care by integrating the best available evidence with practitioner expertise and other resources, and with the characteristics, state, needs, values and preferences of those who will be affected.

 

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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