Admittedly, I'm more than a little late to the game on this one, but for those readers who are not yet aware of the Health Care Renewal Blog, there is a wealth of excellent commentary there on a wide variety of topics, mostly relating to the "concentration and abuse of power." Though picking out one post to excerpt is difficult, as so many of them are worthwhile, I particularly enjoyed Roy Poses's perspective on the Lunesta television ad that night owls like myself are likely to have seen:
National Public Radio's show "All Things Considered" ran a segment last week explaining how direct to consumer (DTC) advertising can make drugs appear better than they may really be.
The show focused on a single television advertisement (with the butterfly) for Lunesta (eszopiclone) marketed by Sepracor for insomnia. The show focused first on the psychology of advertising design, pointing out the following features . . .
Poses concludes that "DTC ads are particularly likely to amount to pseudoevidence-based medicine." As they say, go read the whole thing (and by "whole thing" I mean the blog itself!).
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