Journal article
‘Get with the Program!’: Pharmaceutical marketing, symptom checklists and self-diagnosis
Social science & medicine (1982), v 73(6), pp 825-832
Sep 2011
PMID: 21835526
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
During more than a decade of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTC) of pharmaceuticals in the United States, several highly controversial and contested disease states have been promoted to affect diagnostic and prescribing outcomes that are favorable to a company’s branded drug. Influencing medical diagnosis is essential to the branding of a disease, which helps to protect pharmaceutical intellectual property and assures higher profits for drug companies. Enormous marketing as well as medical resources are deployed to ensure that new diagnoses of disease states are recognized. While much work has been done investigating the marketing processes necessary to shape and define diagnoses for many of these new disease states, such as Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), the promotion of self-diagnosis within pharmaceutical marketing campaigns garner little sociological attention. This article reviews and analyzes branded disease awareness campaigns sponsored by pharmaceutical companies that employ self-diagnostic “tools”. By using the example of one specific disease state, PMDD, I illustrate how the marketing of self-diagnosis transforms the patient into a consumer in order to achieve the aims of a drug company. This example is contextualized within the larger theoretical framework on the sociology of diagnosis. Consideration is given to how the marketing of self-diagnosis goes beyond Jutel’s (2009) description of diagnosis as being the “classification tool of medicine” and becomes a marketing tool to construct a well-educated consumer who will demand medical diagnoses inline with a drug company’s objectives.
Metrics
Details
- Title
- ‘Get with the Program!’: Pharmaceutical marketing, symptom checklists and self-diagnosis
- Creators
- Mary Ebeling - Drexel University, Culture & Communication, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, USA
- Publication Details
- Social science & medicine (1982), v 73(6), pp 825-832
- Publisher
- Elsevier
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Sociology
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000295504700005
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-80052260330
- Other Identifier
- 991014878081804721
UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
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InCites Highlights
Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:
- Web of Science research areas
- Public, Environmental & Occupational Health
- Social Sciences, Biomedical