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Height, Health, Medicine, and the Mirages of Our Forebearer’s Stature
Medieval men and women grew to heights similar to our own. What happened to shrink our more recent ancestors? Go on most historical tours in Europe or America, and you’ll often hear that the small doorframes, cramped quarters, and other incongruities to our modern standard of living exaplained as simple “they were smaller back then.”…
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Understanding the Myriad Forms of Vaccine Skepticism
The political polarization of the country has framed “anti-vaxxers” as a left versus right, rural versus urban, educated versus uneducated debate. The truth is far more complicated and has larger implications for human health. As the mRNA vaccines rolled out to the public in the US in 2021, portions of the US population resisted receiving…
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From Targeting to Content, Brands Need a Strategy for Mid-levels
Pharma reps have visited NPs for over a decade, but all too often we forget a large section of HCPs in branded and awareness campaigns. Today, mid-level practitioners see a broader volume of patients than ever before. The reasons for this are legion: a physician shortage, an aging population, reduced RVU/reimbursement, and a P&L…
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QR Codes are Back – Use Them Wisely
They’re intentional and they hide UTM parameters, and the generational divide in their use is easing. What more could you ask for? After their use eroded to nearly nil, the pandemic gave QR codes something of a second lease on life, beginning with major upticks in the UK and EU and migrating back across the…
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Four Trends We’re Seeing in Pharma TV Ads Now
The post pandemic ad landscape is shifting to meet a changed world If you’ve flipped on the TV for longer than a few minutes, you’ve probably noticed that pharma ads dominate commercial breaks (between my soothing albeit murdery Forensic Files episodes). I have unconfirmed theories as to why, mostly that the fractured media landscape has…
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The Muskification of Twitter (X) has Upended Online Patient Communities
Where and how patients communicate with one another is important, and over the last few years, the Social landscape has changed dramatically. In September of 2019, after working out at the gym, I began to experience severe but intermittent pain in my groin, leg, and lower back. It hurt to sit on hard surfaces and…
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“Side effects may include …”: A Very Brief History of Pharmaceutical Advertising, Part 4
By the mid-eighties, pharmaceutical manufacturers had begun dabbling with DTC marketing. Manufacturers were stymied by a lack of clarity from the FDA (regrettably familiar at times today) and caught up on debates about the public’s desire to learn more about prescription drugs versus their ability to comprehend fully what might be advertised to them. As…
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“Side effects may include …”: A Very Brief History of Pharmaceutical Advertising, Part 3
At mid-century, drugs went through testing before landing on the market. The government also split them into over the counter (OTC) drugs and prescription drugs. While ad campaigns focused on selling OTC brands to consumers using new techniques and tactics pioneered in the “Mad-Men Era” of marketing, ads for prescription drugs focused solely on doctors.…
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“Side effects may include …”: A Very Brief History of Pharmaceutical Advertising, Part 2
By the turn of the 20th century, a new wave of science and expert knowledge swept across medicine. Among elite institutions, medical education began shifting toward the science-based curricula we’d recognize today in the 1890s. Chemists (mostly in Germany) began to isolate and extract singular compounds responsible for the therapeutic effects of old remedies. So…
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“Side effects may include …”: A Very Brief History of Pharmaceutical Advertising, Part I
It might not be awe inspiring or particularly striking, but these 22 seconds marked a paradigm shift in the history of American medicine. Broadcast for just a few days before the FDA suspended it from the air waves, the Boots Rufen Campaign set the stage for the direct to consumer (DTC) environment of pharmaceutical advertisements…
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