Waxing Lyrical over Rash Claims
I wrote last week about the Bad Science book by Ben Goldacre and how much I enjoyed it.
Written for the common man, it contains some astute reasoning and clear evidence of the pharma marketing industry’s sins and omissions.
Ben continues his ‘expose’ of how the Pharma industry bypasses regulation and generates brand awareness using (in his eyes) unregulated practices.
He starts with public relations – the industry’s long established use of ‘advertising equivalents’ as a measure of exposure gained is pretty irritating.
It’s been bugging me for years because it IS NOT an equivalent. Journalistic copy and advertising copy are not the same. GEDDIT?
But the fact he focuses on is not trivial. Journalists are not regulated in the same way that advertising is.
Claims made in advertising and on packaging are tightly regulated in all western and most world markets.
Go and check for yourself – an advert for a vitamin may have a statement like “Glucosamine is a known chemical constituent of cartilage.” But a journalist can wax lyrical about how her knees felt after a week on the supplements making rash claims which a reader may think apply to all.
Celebrity endorsement is another “covert marketing strategy”, according to Goldacre, that bypasses licensing procedures as well as free pseudomedical product literature.
Why are there so many so-called white papers on corporate websites these days? They give the sheen of scientific or academic rigor to your product. But in reality, most are nothing of the sort. They’re working case studies at best. I know, I’ve written them.
Ben is keen for a public clinical trial register to be set up that is public, open and enforced. This is rather similar to the global drug patent database we wrote about in the summer.
A means for independent viewing of trial methodologies in advance so that obvious methodological issues can be clarified, adapted or removed before the study even starts. He also pushes hard for full publication of results “and review by anyone in the world who wants to read your paper”.
Great Tool.
What a great tool the internet is.
Most industries nowadays find that open forum discussion with interested consumers, suppliers and peers is a valid business model.
It has stronger feedback loops and prevents extreme positions than alternatives. It might be considered risk-averse.
And yet there is a clear recent history of drug companies hiding unflattering data and misrepresenting scientific results in marketing literature.
This we already know. And we probably won’t stop it by writing energetic blog posts like this one.
But to finish by quoting Goldacre again: “To engage meaningfully in a political process of managing the evils of big pharma, we need to understand a little about the business of evidence: only then can we understand why transparency is so important in pharmaceutical research, or the details of how it can be made to work or concoct new and imaginative solutions.”
Out new internet-led world is one of the best places to start righting these wrongs. If you were part of mis-directed marketing in the past, it will cease.
The medium that has made outspoken writers like Goldacre a star has the seeds within it to help us all clean up our pharma marketing act.
Let us mutually act responsibly in future. Every long journey starts with a small step.
What’s yours?
(Tomorrow's Post: Bad Science Badgers)
