Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3972

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

Neill JR.
A social history of psychotropic drug advertisements.
Soc Sci Med 1989; 28:(4):333-8

Abstract:

Psychotropic drug advertising for psychiatrists serves many purposes beyond its ostensible function of providing technical information. Medical advertising research has tended almost exclusively to use “conspiracy theoryâ€-that is, they embrace the notion that one group (the advertisers) manipulates the other (the physicians). An examination of psychiatric journals from 1955 to 1980 shows the situation to be more complex. Such advertising seems to serve an orienting and therapeutic function for the physician, mirroring and supporting his professional identity or image. Such a view is in conformation with more recent research on nonmedical advertising.

Keywords:
*analysis/psychotropic drugs/journal advertisements/psychiatrists & psychiatry/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: JOURNAL ADVERTISEMENTS/PROMOTION IN SPECIFIC THERAPEUTIC AREAS: PSYCHIATRIC DISEASES Advertising/history* History, 20th Century Humans Psychiatry/history* Psychotropic Drugs/history* United States

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909