Melody Petersen
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 In the best-organized marketing campaigns, these corporate-sponsored research papers began appearing in medical journals years before the drug was approved for sale. The papers made certain claims over and over again until they were viewed as scientific "truth."
As the pharmaceutical companies realized the power of this marketing technique, they increased spending on what they called research and development, although it would have been more accurately described as "selling and promotion."
At the same time, they gradually took control of most of the country's medical research. |
Bottom Line Health
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| What happened: marketing campaigns from pharmaceutical firms have transformed the way we think about physical and mental health, convincing us that our problems are best cured by using medication. Alternative views of the illness and treatment get short shrift.
•Are these drug companies really the problem? Drug companies make wonderful products that extend lives and ameliorate suffering. However, they are aggressively targeting the healthy as well as the sick in pursuit of profits. One of their strategies is to broaden the boundaries of what constitutes an illness. |
Stacy Malkan
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 For the time being, the big-name companies seem wedded to using the "same old soap technologies" and spending their resources on marketing campaigns to convince consumers their products are safe.
The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, meanwhile, faces the challenge of how to make the Compact pledge meaningful in the world — how to track company compliance and how to define safer ingredients in a landscape where there are so many unknowns about the health impacts of chemicals. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Through its aggressive (and deceptive, in my opinion) marketing campaigns, lack of corporate ethics and ready willingness to exploit human beings for profit, PepsiCo has risen to be one of the most financially profitable yet ethically bankrupt organizations on the planet.
If PepsiCo were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, humanity would be healthier the very next day. PepsiCo's brands include: (followed by my opinion statement about that particular brand)
Frito-Lay: Dangerous junk food that contributes to obesity, heart disease, cancer, depression and other serious diseases. |
Melody Petersen
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| The deaths and serious illnesses that holiday season were alarming evidence of another consequence of the drug companies' potent marketing campaigns. For years Iowans had responded to the industry's advertisements by asking their physicians for prescription antibiotics at the first sneeze or sign of a cold. But often the medicines worked in ways that created mutant germs that were far more powerful than those that had caused the patients' illness. In case after case, the drugs had destroyed the weak germs, while leaving the strong ones to survive and multiply. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 Once that was accomplished, subsequent marketing campaigns dropped the subterfuge and unabashedly promoted Viagra and newer drugs as sexual aids. Less than a decade after Viagra's launch, it's good-bye Bob Dole, hello TV ad for Levitra showing a good-looking couple in their forties, glancing sidelong at each other with suggestively raised eyebrows as a sultry voice-over narrates, "Remember that guy who used to be called "WildThing'?The guy who wanted to spend the entire honeymoon indoors? . . . Yeah, that guy. He's back. |
Melody Petersen
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| Despite their promises, the companies continued their zealous marketing campaigns. In 1994 Dr. David A. Kessler, the commissioner of the FDA, joined four of his colleagues to detail the companies' dangerous practices in an article in The New England Journal of Medicine. The frenzy of corporate promotion was driven, the regulators said, by the fact that the drugs being introduced were "virtually indistinguishable" from one another. Only a minority of the 127 new drugs approved between 1989 and 1993, the FDA officials wrote, had offered any clear clinical advantage over drugs already being sold. |
| One of the most powerful drug marketing campaigns aimed at Christians was performed not directly by the industry but by a theologian named Dr. Paul Meier, a popular radio talk show host and the owner of a chain of mental health clinics. His book Blue Genes was published in 2005 with help from Focus on the Family, a national group popular with many Christian conservatives in Iowa and across the country. The book was a kind of spiritual guide for those dealing with depression or anxiety. |
| Audiences subject to these covert marketing campaigns did not realize they needed to be just as skeptical of the information as they would of that in a drug ad. They did not even know a marketing effort was under way. These underground marketing operations targeted Iowans of all ages, starting with those in preschool.
For example, Iowa doctors sometimes referred their young patients to a nonprofit group called the Magic Foundation, which was started by mothers with children with rare growth disorders in 1989. |
| Wall Street analysts grilled the pharmaceutical executives about their marketing campaigns during conference calls held every three months. Were they hiring more sales reps? When would that new advertising campaign that executives had promised begin? How many dinners had the company hosted for doctors? The financial analysts ranked the companies by the number of drugs they sold that had reached that golden benchmark of one billion dollars in sales in a single year. |
Brenda Watson and Leonard Smith
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 Select Superior Soy
Despite what current marketing campaigns would have you believe, soy can be a challenge to digest, and you'll recall from Chapter 3 that some soy products may come from a genetically modified (GM) food source. Uncultured soy products, which include texturized vegetable protein (TVP), isolated soy protein, soy protein isolates, soy milk, soy flour, soy nuts, and edamame bean, pose a digestive challenge for some people. |
| Drug companies rely so much on profit generated from drugs, especially new ones attached to active patents, that they've begun persuasive marketing campaigns targeting consumers direcuy. In doing so, many times they will angle an ad to make you think you need this pill or that potion to live a healthier, longer life (as in "Ask your doctor if X is right for you." |
Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George
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 Aggressive marketing campaigns undertaken by the Nestle Corporation have been assailed for their role in deterring mothers from breast-feeding, and denying infants its proven benefits. Since being able to breast-feed is a sensitive window of a child's neurological development, health-care professionals who deal with childbirth, especially nurses, must take a proactive role in essential health education. |
Kelly Harford, M.C., C.N.C.
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 The food industry has been so successful in executing marketing campaigns geared toward promoting widespread, lifelong consumption of high-fat-sugar-sodium content foods and highly processed foods that most people today are so hooked they don't even know or care that they are eating poor quality dis-ease causing pseudofoods. People have become so disconnected from their food source and the processes that govern it that poor nutrition has literally become the American way. |
Greg Critser
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 Both are the subject of enormous scientific and marketing campaigns to expand the percentage of Americans who take them. Hence, the liver remains on the front line.
THE HEART, THE LUNGS, THE GUT
Yet the liver, for all its centrality, might best be seen as the canary in the mineshaft of Generation Rx. In terms of outright numbers, other parts of the human body — the heart, the lungs, the gut, and the brain — routinely suffer the most severe adverse effects of the new era's new ways with pills, and none of these organs is as resilient as the liver. |
| IMS was the original pharmaceutical marketing firm; its main product is a huge database of information on prescription drug sales, which it purchased from individual pharmacies and then used to tailor advertising and marketing campaigns for drug makers. The patient information was anonymous, but the data gave marketers a good idea of which prescription drugs were selling, what geographical areas were slow to adopt new ones and which were fast, whether prescriptions were being refilled, and so forth. But there was no data about individual physicians and their prescribing behavior. |
Kelly Harford, M.C., C.N.C.
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| Through relentless advertising and marketing campaigns disguised as educational in nature, they have been successful in creating a cultural climate that upholds milk and dairy products as nourishing wonder foods that if excluded from the diet will result in physical calamity. However, this simply is not true.
Consult with the top experts on nutrition who base their knowledge on sound information and research, rather than parroting marketing ploys, and you will find few who disagree with the notion of limiting the amount of dairy, including milk, in one's diet. For example, Dr. |
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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 But as we've seen, many of our doctors, no matter how committed and hardworking, are still prescribing under the influence of marketing campaigns designed to sell us sickness in order to sell us pills. However, it may be that a fundamental change is coming.
With a membership of fifty thousand, the American Medical Student Association is literally the face of tomorrow's physician. As part of its charter the association takes no sponsorship from the pharmaceutical industry. |
Kelly Harford, M.C., C.N.C.
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| When you consider the magnitude with which we are being deluged with multi-media advertising and marketing campaigns designed by leading psychologists to infiltrate our minds and manipulate our behavior, you can't help but conclude that as a society we are being subjected to a kind of bad food brainwashing. And, as the dramatic changes in our eating habits show, it's working. Remember this whenever you are faced with making decisions about what to eat. |
| Savvy food industry psychologists know this, and launch commercial marketing campaigns designed to take advantage of it.
There are a growing number of parents who are aware of this phenomenon as well, and shield their children from mind-altering commercialism by only allowing their children to watch non-commercial public television. Some might consider this extreme, but it's important to remember that the marketing tactics children are being bombarded with are even more extreme. |
| The same decade in which mass marketing campaigns and mass availability of soft drinks were introduced into the public school systems.
In response to the frequently voiced argument that students are free to choose whether or not they drink soda, certainly there exist many choices students are free to make and yet are not allowed on school grounds. The question is not whether or not children are free to make the choice to drink soda; the question is does this choice put them at risk? |
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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| The pharmaceutical industry and its supporters defend their marketing campaigns as raising awareness about misunderstood diseases, and providing quality information about the latest medicines. Company executives talk of empowering consumers with advertising, and their paid celebrities are said to educate the public about health conditions via glossy magazine articles and on TV talk shows. Certainly there are some valuable examples of industry-sponsored efforts to destigmatize a health problem or stimulate much-needed action, as has occurred in the area of HIV-AIDS. |
Mike Adams
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 Yet, for some odd reason—probably because of the aggressive marketing campaigns of the dairy industry—many adult humans today remain utterly convinced that dairy products are not only compatible with human biology, but actually reverse various chronic diseases.
Eliminating dairy products from your diet means eliminating cow's milk, cheese, and other dairy products, which can result in a remarkable recovery and a lifetime elimination of sinusitis, and sometimes even asthma and constipation, too. There's only one way to know, however, if this will work for you: Try the 30-day, no-dairy diet. |
| Even beyond the absurd laws that allow marketing drugs directly to consumers, those marketing campaigns consist almost exclusively of lies, distortions, and half-truths. As you'll see in the pages that follow, the mass marketing of drugs is little more than a massive brainwashing campaign that has only three true purposes:
1. To cause patients to demand drugs by name, even when they have no idea what conditions those drugs treat.
2. To cause doctors to subsequently prescribe those drugs with astonishing frequency, even when doctors think they're immune to patient influence.
3. |
Kelly Patricia O'Meara
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 As a result of successful marketing campaigns, consumers tend to identify trade names with generic products. We ask for Kleenex when we mean any brand of soft facial tissue. We ask for a Xeroxed copy when we mean a photocopy. And we speak of the "Prozac nation" when referring to antidepressants or even psychiatric drugs in general. |
Jacky Law
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 Laws that protect patients from pharma marketing campaigns, for example, are seen by one side as a way to control demand and keep total costs down. To the other, they are excessive control denying Europeans access to information about drugs from the companies that produce them. The people who support enterprise acknowledge the marketing costs on the public purse and consider it money well spent. |
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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| Groups like the National Women's Health Network see themselves as doing exactly that—advocating a view of menopause as a natural process, at the same time as exposing the marketing campaigns that reinforce the idea of a disease of deficiency or loss.23 The group's director of programs and policy is Harvard graduate Amy Allina—a strong critic of the marketing of menopause.24 She says Wyeth's campaign featuring Hutton "plays off the celebrity worship in this country. |
| In the frankest of terms the report describes the selling of sickness: the analyst outlines how companies are "expanding the patient pool" by using marketing campaigns to change public perceptions about what used to be considered normal life. "The medicalization of many natural processes," says the report, "is creating markets for lifestyle drugs for those who want to 'optimize quality of life.'"7
. .. pharmaceutical companies are searching for new disorders, based on extensive analysis of unexploited market opportunities (whether recognized today or promoted as such tomorrow). |
Dr. Timothy Scott
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 As soon as the selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors go off patent, the pharmaceuticals will adjust the chemical formula (and their advertising and marketing campaigns), and we will learn that serotonin is not the key to healing depression, but it will be GABA or epinephrine or some neurotransmitter we don't even know about today. (Or they may add one of these chemicals to serotonin to provide us with a new type of antidepressant. |
Paula Begoun
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 Statistics may not have much to do with your own personal hair-care needs, but they tell companies how to approach their marketing campaigns, and that affects how you spend money. It can cost millions of dollars to introduce a new product to consumers, and it's how a product is presented that determines its success or failure. Because we are coloring our hair more and more frequently, those of us who never had damaged hair are now battling frizzies, split ends, and "grow-out." These problems, in turn, require new products and new guarantees. |
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