9/10 Dentists Recommend This?

9/10 Dentists Recommend This?

I’m sure you would have seen this claim in advertisements for a Toothpaste or toothbrush, or some other product. But how true is this claim? And is this legal?

[1] The Indian Dental Association Code of Ethics prohibits dentists from attaching their names to commercial products like toothpaste, toothbrush, tooth powder, mouth washes, etc.

[2] So no individual dentist can promote such a product publicly.

[3] That is the reason why you won’t see any real dentists in any of these ads. They always use actors.

[4] The advertisements are a marketing ploy. When they say 9/10 dentists recommend it, your brain registers it as 90% of dentists, but that’s not actually true.

[5] Ad makers avoid it being false information by simply conducting a survey of small number of dentists and claim to only be stating the results of the survey.

[6] How robust, unbiased the survey was, and what exactly the dentists chose, is important, but not revealed in any ad. 9/10 dentists does not mean 90% of all dentists, it could literally mean 9 out of the 10 dentists they chose to survey.

[7] These kind of ads have ran into legal problems in other countries.

[8] The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) of UK, asked Colgate to discontinue such advertisements in view of the ad breaching regulations on advertising.

[9] ASA remarked that the advertisements misleadingly implied professional endorsement by dentists, and noted that during the said surveys it was not made sufficiently clear to the dentists that the research was being conducted on behalf of Colgate or that the results could be used for advertising purposes.

[10] So the next time you see advertisements for products which claim to be backed by dentists/doctors, be aware that their claims are based on their own unregulated marketing surveys and not scientific research.

#doctors #indiandoctors #medicolegal #medlegal #medicallaw #medicalethics #medicalnegligence #advertisements #dentists