Hyping Heart Attacks [1]
Submitted by Bob Burton [2] on
Alan Cassels notes that disease mongering [3] advertisements for cholesterol-lowering drugs, such as for Pfizer [4]'s Lipitor [5], hype the risk of heart attacks for those people with 'high' cholesterol. Aside from camouflaging 'disease awareness' campaigns behind the name of a patient group [6], Cassels warns that when scientists have analysed the results of a number of studies on a drug "they inevitably find that the drugs show no difference in mortality, when compared against placebo." One Pfizer ad, under an image of a corpse with a toe tag, asked “what would you rather have, a cholesterol test or a final exam?” "What you don’t get in the ads scaring you to see your doc for a cholesterol test," writes Cassels, "is any sense of the dangers these kinds of drugs pose." PR Week reports [7] (sub req'd) that Pfizer has recently awarded the global PR account for promoting Lipitor to Weber Shandwick [8].