Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4010

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

Children’s vitamin preparations: kidding the kids and their parents
1989 Aug; 4:(8):109-110

Abstract:

Companies are now advertising their products through children. One child brought home a letter about a multivitamin product. Although the letter was signed by a doctor it was clearly prepared by the drug company Byk Gulden. An ad for another multivitamin preparation from Rhone-Poulenc misquoted an article that had been published in the Lancet.

Keywords:
*analysis/Philippines/developing countries/DTCA/direct-to-consumer advertising/quality of information/children/vitamins/Byk Gulden/ Rhône-Poulenc/ references/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER ADVERTISING/PROMOTION AND HEALTH NEEDS: PROMOTION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

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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