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HEALTH CONSUMERISM: CHOICES AND CHALLENGES
Perhaps the single greatest difficulty that we face as health consumers is the sheer magnitude of choices available to us. If you try to select a general practitioner from the telephone book when you are sick, you may have to thumb through dozens of pages of specialists. When going to the drugstore for a bottle of cough syrup, you may have to choose from hundreds of options, each claiming to do more for you than the brand next to it. Even trained pharmacists sometimes find it impossible to keep up with the explosion of new drugs and health-related products.
Because there are so many profit-seekers competing for a share of the lucrative health market and because misinformation is so common, wise health consumers use every means at their disposal to ensure that they are acting responsibly and economically in making their own health choices.
Attracting Consumers\' Dollars
Today’s marketing specialists can identify a target audience for a given product and carefully go after it with a whole arsenal of gimmicks, subtle persuaders, and sophisticated strategies. Different techniques are used to attract new customers, maintain existing customers, and encourage consumers of the product to switch to another brand. Many advertisements present a product as a status symbol that will make you a member of the \"in\" crowd. In addition, many ads play on inner fears and insecurities, causing you to wonder whether your deodorant is working, your breath is bad, or your skin is greasy.
Whatever your desires, countless products and services are available to meet them. Although some marketing tactics are obvious, others are much more subtle and difficult to discern. Perfume advertisements that depict passionate embraces and automobile ads that feature expensive sports cars with beautiful young men and women are common. The implied message is that if you purchase a given perfume, your love life will improve, and if you buy that flashy car, attractive people will flock to you.
Many other marketing strategies revolve around \"trend\" news items. A good example of this is the current fascination with the use of herbs to treat the common cold and wearable magnets to treat arthritis and painful joints.
Putting Cure into Better Perspective
People often fall victim to false health claims because they mistakenly believe that a product or provider has helped them. This belief often arises from two conditions: spontaneous remission and the placebo effect.
Spontaneous Remission:
It is commonly said that if you treat a cold, it will disappear in a week, but if you leave it alone, it will last seven days. A spontaneous remission from an ailment refers to the disappearance of symptoms without any apparent cause or treatment. Many illnesses, like the common cold and even back strain, are self-limiting and will improve in time, with or without treatment. Other illnesses, such as multiple sclerosis and some cancers, are characterize by alternating periods of severe symptoms and sudden remissions. People experiencing spontaneous remissions can easily attribute their \"cure\" to a treatment, drug, or provider, which in fact had no real effect on the disease or condition. On the other hand, there is little scientific evidence that new, unusual, or ancient treatments offer no benefit to the consumer.
Placebo Effect:
The placebo effect is an apparent cure or improved state of health brought about by a substance, product, or procedure that has no generally recognized therapeutic value. It is not uncommon for patients4o report improvements based on what they expect, desire, or were told would happen after taking simple sugar pills that they believed were powerful drugs. About 10 percent of the population is believed to be exceptionally susceptible to the power of suggestion and may be easy targets of the aggressive marketing of products and services. Although the placebo effect is generally harmless, it does account for the expenditure of millions of dollars on health products and services every year. Ingesting mega-doses of vitamin С to treat cancer has never been shown to be effective, nor has unwrinkling of skin from mud baths or muscle pain reduction from electric shocks. People who mistakenly use placebos when medical treatment is urgently needed increase their risk for health problems. Those who use low-cost, no-risk placebos and find relief, even for just a short time, should not be criticized.
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GENERAL HEALTH
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