This is slightly OT, but I thought you all might be
interested to know that marketing in hospitals has reached
a new low and that there are people out there trying to fight
it. How can we join forced with these people??
  Naomi Bar-Yam
--------------------------------------------
Commercial Alert, February 25, 2003
Commercial Alert and leading doctors sent letters today to the CEOs of all
US hospital chains with more than 2000 beds, asking them not to carry
General Electric's new TV "Patient Channel," because it plays manipulative
drug advertising to patients in their hospital beds.  General Electric
aims
to install the "Patient Channel" in 1,000 hospitals by the end of 2003.

Here is a text version of today's letter to the CEOs of hospital chains.
Dear __________:
In September, General Electric launched the Patient Channel, which shows
medical programming and drug ads to patients in hospitals and waiting
rooms
across the country.  The shows and ads run 24 hours a day, seven days a
week.
The Patient Channel is essentially a marketing tool for the nation's
pharmaceutical corporations.   It was designed to give them access to a
captive audience at a time of maximum vulnerability and emotional
distress.
In the studied euphemisms of the channel's marketing director, Kelly
Peterson, the Patient Channel enables drug companies to "directly
associate
their products with a particular condition in a hospital setting."
In other words, pitch drugs to them at a time when they are most worried
about disease, in a way that carries the implicit authority and
endorsement
of the hospital and its doctors.  Two direct-to-consumer drug advertising
executives were more candid. "The ultimate goal of DTC advertising," they
wrote, "is to stimulate consumers to ask their doctors about the
advertised
drug and then, hopefully, get the prescription."
"Consumers react emotionally," another drug advertising executive
explained,
"so you want to know how they feel about your message and what emotional
triggers will get them to act....  We want to identify the emotions we can
tap into to get that customer to take the desired course of action."
It is no mystery why drug companies would covet this new system of
advertising delivery and emotional manipulation.  It strains belief,
however, that hospitals would even consider playing host to it. Hospitals
are in the healing business, not the business of tapping the emotions of
vulnerable patients for the benefit of hucksters of pills.  It is not
their
role to deliver patients' "share of mind" -- in the revealing phrase of
Pharmaceutical Executive magazine -- to these hucksters.  To do so would
give whole new meaning to the term "Sick Hospital Syndrome."
If you provide information to patients, it should be balanced, complete,
and
unbiased.  It should not be sales propaganda designed to push pills.  Do
you
really want to invite situations in which patients hear one thing from
their
doctors and then get conflicting advice from their hospital TV?  Does it
need saying that your doctors should be the guides to your patients'
health,
and not the advertising agencies that will craft the sales pitches on the
Patient Channel?
Pharmaceutical companies have an irremediable conflict of interest in any
information they provide to patients.  Educating patients about possible
courses of treatment - sometimes about questions of life or death -- is
far
too important to be left to them.
We urge you to do the right thing.  Maintain the integrity of your
hospitals
and of the doctor-patient relationship.  Just say no to this ad delivery
system called the Patient Channel, and keep it out of your hospitals.
Sincerely,

signed by 20 or 30 medical and medical administration types, all with
impressive affiliations and degrees.

             ***********************************************

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