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posted by on Wednesday May 24 2017, @09:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the almost-like-advertising-is-the-raison-d'être dept.

This year on General Hospital, central character Anna Devane is stricken with a rare and life-threatening type of blood cancer. Gasp! OK, this may not be shocking; dramatic, unlikely, and always tragic events are the norm on soap operas. But this one is a little different.

Prior to the tear-jerking diagnosis, the ABC daytime drama—the longest running soap opera in the US—made a deal with a pharmaceutical company to come up with her fate. And the company, Incyte Corporation, just so happens to make the only targeted therapy for fictional Anna's very real form of cancer. This did not sit well with two doctors.

In an opinion piece published this week in JAMA, Sham Mailankody of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Vinay Prasad of Oregon Health & Science University systematically question the intent of the promotion. The piece ends with a call to arms to medical policy makers and regulators to try to stamp out these "creative" promotions.

These promotions have "tangible effects on health care behavior and can lead to unintended consequences, including wasteful diagnostic testing, overdiagnosis, and inappropriate therapy," the pair argue. "The status quo appears increasingly untenable: direct-to-consumer advertising is a massive medical intervention with unproven public health benefit, dubious plausibility, and suggestive evidence of harm."

Source: Ars Technica

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @11:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @11:26PM (#515186)

    Another good reason to not waste attention or time on TV which just spews out the lowest common denominator junk. And if there is anything important to send, well then vested interests will censor it into a grey bland goo and what remains is a worthless waste of RF spectrum at best.

    The question becomes how to deter others from seeing the shit and acting on it. Or not act..