- © 2007 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors
[PAAB responds:]
To my recollection, the Pharmaceutical Advertising Advisory Board (PAAB) has not received any formal complaints of sexism in advertising during the 21 years that I have been at PAAB. During this time, we have rejected some advertising submissions because of sexism or sex-role stereotyping. In general, advertiser focus-group testing will weed out overt violations of section 2.5 of the PAAB Code of Advertising Acceptance (available at www.paab.ca).
The Testim advertisement was approved in May 2007 and has been running in medical journals since that time. We have received no direct comments from physicians, either by written communication or by phone. At this point, we have received little input that the ad actually offends many physicians. We have re-reviewed the ad internally by 10 professionals, including 5 women, and we have found no objection to the continued acceptance of the ad. At the time of the review, the review team thought that the subject matter was directly related to the approved indication for use as shown in the Health Canada approved terms of market authorization. The manufacturer, Paladin, told us that they had performed focus testing with licensed physicians and that they had not received any negative comments.
PAAB is not a censor, and we look for relevance to therapeutics as a starting point when we review graphics. We rely on evidence to make negative rulings, including feedback on subjective ethical or moral issues. The CMA has representation on the PAAB board of directors, and I appreciate collective feedback from organized physician groups like the CMA when making review-policy decisions. Historically, PAAB has had collective informed input from the CMA about ads involving smoking, car seats and bicycle helmets, and the PAAB has set review policy accordingly.
Footnotes
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Competing interests: None declared.