Appeals to sympathy etc

Appeal to Pity (Argumentum ad Misericordiam)

You know, Doctor, this drug just isn't doing well in my territory. Even though I'm out there working hard, my sales just don't show it. Couldn't you help me a little by just trying my drug on a few patients?

"Pity melts the mind," wrote the poet Dryden. It is for the pharmaceutical representative to push the right button to flip us from logical thinker to sympathetic listener. Carefully intermingled with other facts, an appeal to pity can be overlooked and make its way into our decision process without our realizing it.

The above example is a rather blatant appeal to pity, but there are other, less obvious approaches. Occasionally advertisements imply that a brand-name product should be specified over the generic so that money generated by the brand-name manufacturers can be used to discover new and better drugs. Other approaches suggest that the prescriber should take pity on the patient and prescribe a particular medication, ignoring the-fact that the drug may offer little or no benefit.
- Shaughnessy et al (1994)

Shaughnessy AF, Slawson DC, Bennett JH. Separating the wheat from the chaff: identifying fallacies in pharmaceutical promotion. J Gen Intern Med 1994;9:563-8.