Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18353

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

Glinert LH
Side effect warnings in British medical package inserts: A discourse analytical approach
International Journal of Cognitive Ergonomics 1998; 2:(1-2):61-74

Abstract:

British prescription medicines have recently been required by law to include information leaflets, supplied by industry, based on datasheets but intended to be comprehensible to laypeople, whom surveys have shown to be largely ignorant of side effects. Close discourse analysis of the side effect warnings in a sample of 25 leaflets revealed a complex interplay between a scientific and a lay perspective and between an “open” and a “discreet” attitude to side effects, answering to humanitarian and commercial goals. A basic rhetorical structure of warning + reassurance takes on a variety of bold forms, with side effects listed frankly yet “packed” discreetly in running text with scant graphic highlights. Linguistically, hedging of the side effect by “may” and a range of modal and temporal adjectives, quantifiers, and subtly modulated lexis and syntax creates a sense of indeterminacy, and a vagueness or ambivalence is sometimes found in the warnings and instructions themselves. The intense public interest in reading side effect labels heightens the cotextuality and intertextuality by which terms are presumably understood. Words such as “you” and “this” create a “personal” ethos, but formal tones and nominalized academic style are not uncommon.