Topic 114: The Psychology of Patent Medicines

Carol:

Patently Absurd

Last night the CBS program 60 Minutes had a special segment on the latest hoax in 21st century medicine,  internet-advertised stem-cell therapy “clinics.” Not that medical scams are a new idea, just the marketing through cyberspace. 
 
The term “patent medicine” may confuse someone into believing that the term refers to medical treatments that have gone through rigorous testing and FDA approval to gain a patent.  The term actually refers to over-the-counter medicines whose brand names are protected by patents, not the actually drug compounds themselves. More specifically, it refers to the kind of “medicines” we associate with movies about the Old West, the “snake oil salesmen” and medicine shows.   Pitchmen would pedal cure-all ointments, tonics and elixirs out of tents or wagons, and the medicine shows themselves were spectacles that drew in the crowds with Wild West themes, displays of muscle men.  Patent medicines were claimed to cure everything from scarlet fever to TB and cancer to veneral disease, and the primary “hook” was the testimonial of “satisfied users.” (source Wikipedia—Patent Medicine)
 
With the proliferation of women’s magazines in the latter half of the 19th century, print advertising became the primary marketing tool, women the target audience. It was an “anything goes” business with no government or medical oversight of the medicinal claims of patent medicines and no limitations on what could be advertised. By the early 1890’s patent medicine advertising in magazines and through direct-mail circulars brought in millions of dollars in revenue to both the advertisers and the magazines. Thus was born a new industry, the advertising business.
 
Ironically, the demise of the patent medicine industry came as the result of self-policing in the magazine industry itself. Journalists and publishers began to investigate patent medicine claims, started publishing their findings, and then called a halt to advertising from their most lucrative customers. One of the first  was The Ladies Home Journal in 1892 followed by 7 other newspapers and magazines over the next two years. The Journal’s Editor Edward Bok went to great lengths to investigate and expose the trickery behind their claims. One of the most popular products “Lydia Pinkham’s Herb Medicine” had such a following that it encouraged women to write to Miss Pinkham for all kinds of advice. Bok put the advertisement showing Miss Pinkham at work in her laboratory in The Ladies’ Home Journal next to a photograph of her tombstone showing she had been deadline for over twenty years. (Source:  Bok) Eventually, a 1905 expose in Collier’s Weekly led to the passage of the first “Pure Food and Drug Act” a year later, which called for strict labeling and eventually patent medicines were banned.
 
So, here we are almost a hundred years later, and the industry for pedaling both prescription and over-the-counter medicines is now a multi-million dollar business.  Drug companies, which sent salesmen to the doctor’s office, now advertise directly to the patient via print, image, and cyberspace. Who has NOT gotten an e-mail in the last month—whatever your age or gender—for the latest version of Viagra?
 
Advertising is all about psychology, and what more vulnerable target for the Big Business of health-care than people who are sick, afraid, or desperate for medical alternatives? Yesterday’s medicine show elixir is today’s nutritional supplement.   Want a “time-proven” simpler, cheaper remedy than stem-cell therapy? Numark Laboratories sells Lydia Pinkham Herbal Compound as part of its “innovative treatments for unique medical conditions. (source: Numark Laboratories)

Sources:
Edward William Bok (1863–1930). The Americanization of Edward Bok. 1921. XXX “Cleaning Up the Patent-  Medicine And Other Evils.”   http://www.bartleby.com/197/30.html
 

Numark Laboratories> Lydia Pinkham Herbal Compound.
            http://www.numarklabs.com/index.php?src=gendocs&link=LydiaPinkham&category=Nutritional%20Supplements
Wikipedia Patent Medicine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_medicine

Megan:

The Power of the Brand Name Cold Medicine

So, I wrote most of this essay in my head over the weekend before my mother casually mentioned that “Patent Medicine” was an actual thing, rather than a general term. I assumed it had something to do with branding – the power of brand recognition, but apparently it’s a term specific to 19th century elixirs and powders with potentially hazardous ingredients of dubious origin. And, I don’t care to write about that. Maybe mom did. Or you could look it up yourself. I’m just going with my original thought – about brand recognition, and the magical powers associated thereto.

As I mentioned last week, I hurt my back and was given painkillers and muscle relaxants – specifically Vicodin (or as I like to call it Vomit-em) and Valium. Those are the words that the nurse practitioner used when she told me what she was prescribing. I’d taken Vicodin about 10 years ago when I had an operation (see My Ailments), and had heard of Valium only in its application as an anti-anxiety medication. But when I collected the medication from the pharmacy, I noticed that the little orange bottles had different names on the label – hydrocodone and diazepam.

It wasn’t until I moved to England and I couldn’t find the familiar names like Advil,  or Tylenol that I realized that medications also have chemical names. In a country which refers to most things by its most popular brand name (Biro for ball-point pen, Hoover for vacuum, Philedelphia for cream cheese), over-the-counter medication is seemed almost exclusively referred to by the chemical names. In England, the go to drug for all aches, pains and feverish ailments is paracetamol –(in this country: the same drug is called acetaminophen (why aren’t the chemical names the same??)). 

The only brand name cold remedy I ever became familiar with, or that had the ubiquitous referral was Lemsip – a specific brand, but referred to any flavored (usually lemon, but also cherry) powder which was dissolved in hot water and drunk like a nasty fruity tea. I suppose the fact that it was consumed as a hot drink was meant to be soothing, like having a nice cuppa, but I only tried it a couple of times before I managed to track down some orange liquid capsules that at least resembled the day-time version of my favorite cold medicine.

I’ve always known there were generic versions of big brand items. Safeway and Fry’s have their own brands of over-the-counter cold and flu remedies. Every time someone in the house is sick and we send my father out for DayQuil, he invariably comes back with the store brand because it’s cheaper. Even though he has sat me down and compared the ingredients side by side, I can always tell that there was a difference in quality, that the cheaper brands don’t work as well and that my father doesn’t really love me.

That’s the power of advertising.