3 ms·
All ads for medical treatments should be illegal
by cwkoss 8y ago
All ads for medical treatments should be illegal
- WalterBright 8y agoSo ignorant consumers become totally reliant on getting medical information only from doctors?
- cyborgx7 8y agoOr independent reporting. Or public information offers. Ads are not a good way of distributing good information. And people who argue otherwise are naive, or doing so in bad faith.
- WalterBright 8y agoThere's no way to distinguish an ad from those things. It's analogous to distinguishing between porn and art.
- quotemstr 8y agoPaying for placement is a clear boundary between one and the other, isn't it?
- SamReidHughes 8y agoWhat if somebody slanders your product?
- Dylan16807 8y agoFiguring out astroturfing isn't a perfect system, but kicking out TV/radio/magazine/banner/streaming ads is straightforward and beneficial.
- okmokmz 8y agoYou think people are getting better medical information from ads than from doctors? I don't know about you, but if I started taking a new medication every time I saw an ad saying I needed to I would be on a lot of boner pills
- WalterBright 8y agoI consider my doctor an adviser, not an oracle.
- okmokmz 8y agoI'm not saying anyone should blindly trust their doctor, and I would advise anyone to do their own research before accepting any kind of medication/treatment, but I agree that advertising medication should be illegal and provides essentially no beneficial or unbiased information. The goal of ads for medication it to make money, not to help people
- Broken_Hippo 8y agoGood sources of health information exist outside of doctors. Lots of governments, health insurance providers, colleges, and so on have good information. Not to mention pharmacists, nurses, and the like. And, of course, doctors. Why the heck would you trust an ad for a medical advice over a doctor - or set of doctors - giving you care after having been educated in the medical field well longer than yourself? There is also a slew of information the general public doesn't really understand. Like why New Shiny Drug X isn't really an improvement for you than Slightly Older Shiny Drug S. Or why the doctor is leaning towards disease X instead of Y even though the symptoms are similar. And then there is the bottom of the barrel. The outright dangerous stuff. David Avocado Wolf, for instance. The "Clean Eating" bandwagon. Being vegan without proper nutrition information, which is often lacking in the material. Or anti-vaccine movements that claim measles are good for folks, lying to say it prevents cancer. If you are lucky, you'll just wind up with one of the "cures" that aren't cures, but not actually harmful. Airborne for colds, for example, or most homeopathy that actually is. Or you might get mildly unlucky and wind up pregnant for not realizing St John's Wart can interfere with birth control. Or maybe Zicam will cause loss of the sense of smell. Considering this last bits of information... yeah, I wish folks would only get their information from accredited medical professionals (though this includes more than doctors).
- WalterBright 8y agoFor a historical example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyndale_Bible#Reaction_of_the_Catholic_Church_and_execution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyndale_Bible#Reaction_of_the_... The argument against Tyndale was essentially the same.