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
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @11:57PM (2 children)
The vast majority of which are simply insane. Also, the US is only a bit better by comparison; it's still terrible when it comes to free speech. The US has obscenity laws, arrests people over bomb jokes, and still has things like FCC censorship. A lot of these restrictions restrict sexual content in certain contexts, which I hope you could agree is simply insane.
What, specifically, are you referring to here?
There is no justification for restricting speech based on "harm" that is entirely in the eye of the beholder.
In this case, any free speech restrictions would be designed to prevent incredibly unintelligent people who apparently believe everything they hear in soap operas and elsewhere from forming undesirable conclusions. I don't see how that's justifiable, since it's their problem for taking fiction so seriously.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday May 25 2017, @12:23AM (1 child)
While deplorable in many aspects. The basis seems to be sound. A lot of countries have various insane restrictions. A lot of important issues are not about sex or bomb jokes. But about the state of a country etc.
It may spill over onto other people that do make intelligent decisions as the effect of the actions of less smart people may have on others. Let them have spam for Las Vegas gaming etc.. less harmful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @07:25AM
Sound? Restricting people's fundamental right to free speech simply because you're offended by something is not "sound".
What does that even mean? You're not making any sense. Are you saying that because sex and bomb jokes aren't "important" to you, that protecting those forms of free speech is therefore not very important? What you find "important" or not is subjective. All free speech is necessarily important to people who care about freedom and principles. If you disagree, then you don't really care about free speech at all, but instead care about speech pertaining to subjects you personally approve of.
In the US, such restrictions are 100% unconstitutional, so that's another reason to care about it.
Sounds like the problem is still that people believe whatever they hear. You're not even actually fixing the underlying problem by restricting speech; instead, you're only hiding it in a specific context.