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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 19116

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

Brezis M, Wiist WH
Vulnerability of Health to Market Forces
Med Care 2011 Feb 4;
http://journals.lww.com/lww-medicalcare/Fulltext/publishahead/Vulnerability_of_Health_to_Market_Forces.99634.aspx


Abstract:

OBJECTIVES: This article reviews
adverse influences of for-profit
enterprises on health care and
public health, and examines
significance for public policy.

RESEARCH DESIGN: Narrative review.

RESULTS: For-profit health-care
industries may increase costs and
reduce quality, leading to market
failure and contributing to the
USA’s unflattering position in
international comparisons of
health-care efficiency. Drug and
device corporations use strategies
such as making biased inferences,
influencing scientists and
physicians, marketing rather than
informing the public, and lobbying
to control their own industry
regulations to create market
advantage. Successful marketing
leads to the increased use of costly
profit-making drugs and procedures
over cheaper, nonpatented therapies.
Because resources are limited, the
overuse of costly modalities
contributes to expensive health
care, which presents a challenge to
universal coverage. The free market
also fosters the proliferation of
industries, such as tobacco, food,
and chemicals, which externalize
costs to maximize profits, seek to
unduly influence research by paying
experts and universities, and
attempt to control the media and
regulatory agencies. Most vulnerable
to the cumulative harm of these
tactics are children, the poor, the
sick, and the least educated.

CONCLUSIONS: The free market can
harm health and health care. The
corporate obligation to increase
profits and ensure a return to
shareholders affects public health.
Such excesses of capitalism pose
formidable challenges to social
justice and public health. The
recognition of the health risks
entailed by corporation-controlled
markets has important implications
for public policy. Reforms are
required to limit the power of
corporations.

 

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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