Dialogue: Miracle cure until you read all the fine print

By DON DONOVAN

I was in the advertising agency business when the first electronic commercials for proprietary drugs were made and broadcast.

One of the immediate and most obvious problems we encountered in their preparation emerged from government regulations that required warnings to accompany all published advertising relating to drugs that claimed a therapeutic value.

Such was the mass of detail involved that, while it could be read in the small print of a newspaper or magazine advertisement, there was no way that it could be transmitted in a sound-only radio commercial.

However, the visual component of a television advertisement allowed the small print to appear, albeit too small and for far too short a period for anybody to be able to read it.

We used to boggle at the stupidity of the bureaucrats who framed the regulations and who were, it seemed, perfectly satisfied that the advertisements complied with their law - in fact, would have banned them had they not carried the useless caveats.

They must have realised that they served no function other than to clutter up the last few frames of the commercials.

Over the years, more and more proprietary drug advertising has appeared. Its functions (in addition to making appropriate audiences aware of potions that might fix their plights) are obviously to manipulate the patient-doctor interaction, so that the brand of drug, rather than its competitor or generic alternative, might be prescribed, and to influence Pharmac policy through consumer demand.

Every day, we see on our screens clever advertisements for help with weight control, arthritis, prostate malfunction and such, all of which accentuate the positive in no uncertain terms while, in compliance with the law, offering the downsides in now-you-see-it-now-you-don't illegible graphics.

So nothing's changed since the early days except that there's a lot more of it.

In my mail, there recently arrived a print advertisement for a drug that would help me (a non-smoker) beat the habit: this tablet, the advertisement promised, "really works."

The accompanying illustration emphasised the Government's cigarette packet warning, "Smoking Kills." For $100 I could be cured of the death-dealing habit just by taking a pill.

But there's always bad news and it was in the small print, the stuff you can see but not read in television advertisements.

It seems that if I were to take this pill, it might do possibly fatal things to me if I were already on bupoprion; or had a seizure disorder; or anorexia or bulimia; or was taking anti-depressant drugs.

Anybody aged under 18 was warned off. And if you happened to take too many of these little pills, they might give you a seizure (fascinating word that, Victorian novelists loved it).

The fine print suggested that before popping the preparation, one really ought to tell one's doctor if one had had a head injury, brain tumour, history of alcohol abuse, diabetes, liver or kidney disease or a bipolar disorder.

It occurred to me at this point that if one had to tell one's doctor all that stuff, a not very efficient doctor-patient relationship existed.

I also found myself wondering what, if this small print was aimed at lay people, they were expected to deduce from a bipolar disorder. Something to do with Scott and Amundsen perhaps?

Patients, the small print continued, were cautioned if using machinery or driving, and were further warned of the possibilities of a long list of side-effects including fever, tiredness, chest pain, accelerated heartbeat, increased or decreased blood pressure, flushing, shakiness, dizziness, depression, confusion, ringing in the ears, impaired vision, sweating, itching, hives, difficulty breathing and swelling of the tongue.

All so drastic, it reminded me of the French Revolution's headache cure, and having read the inventory I felt that there were, after all, some things in life more harmful than a quick cough and a drag half a dozen times a day by the wheelie-bins at the back of the office. It also set me thinking.

How come the smoking cure carries all that regulatory information when packets of fags offer little more than finger-wagging fortune-cookie predictions such as "Smoking is Addictive"?

Quite stressful, all that reading. Anyone got a light?

* Don Donovan is an Auckland writer.