(cross posted on Legal Ethics Forum)
The MD Anderson Cancer Center, at the University of Texas, has been running television commercials in Chicago (and I presume elsewhere) for the past few months. MD Anderson is beyond question one of the premier cancer treatment facilities in the United States, drawing patients from well beyond Texas. The advertising campaign is obviously intended to lengthen its national reach, but I wonder if anyone else is concerned about the content of the ads.
This commercial, for example, consists almost entirely of testimonials by patients and medical personnel, including what appear to be promises of results, spoken mostly by doctors:
"You tried to take everyone. But I won't let you."
"We will stop you."
"Cancer, you're going to lose."
At best, these statements seem tremendously exaggerated. Perhaps they might even be seen as omitting "a fact necessary to make the statement considered as a whole not materially misleading." See MRPC 7.1. After all, even MD Anderson cannot guarantee that every patient "will win." ("And we are going to win" is the final line in the commercial.)
I showed this ad to my internist, a professor of medicine, who called it a "pretense of defeating cancer," while of course endorsing MD Anderson as "a wonderful place to get the best cancer care in the world."
Yes, I know that lawyer ads can be worse; often much worse. But I have never seen a television ad for a law firm with comparable international status to MD Anderson.
What do others think?
That commercial plays incessantly in my market, too. It is annoying and it would certainly be more ethical for the ad to state clearly that they do not and cannot guarantee remission, cure, or anything else.
That said, I'm inclined to view the statements you point to as puffery, especially given the unfortunate ubiquity of "war on cancer" rhetoric and what one hopes is the widespread public understanding that MD Anderson does not have a magic cure for cancer that it has not shared with the rest of the world that guarantees its patients alone a 100% "success" rate. After all, most of the ad is future-oriented: "Cancer is going to lose and we are going to win," not (quite) "At MD Anderson, the cancer always loses and the patient always wins." The implicit message seems to be that they are *working* to "cure cancer" and their patients, relative to patients at most other cancer treatment facilities, have access to cutting-edge techniques that are part of that effort. That is probably more true than false.
On the third hand, this isn't the first time an eyebrow has been raised over MD Anderson's strategy to gain a national reputation, including its "Moon Shots Program" to cure cancer (https://ksj.mit.edu/tracker/2012/09/cnn-worst-cancer-cure-hype-ever/) and its questionable ad placement alongside a badly hyped Time piece on curing cancer that touted MD Anderson (https://ksj.mit.edu/tracker/2013/04/did-time-magazine-offer-favorable-covera/).
And of course--to answer the question the title of your post raises--there are in fact ethical and legal limits of medical advertising (as I'm sure you know) that have been pretty clearly violated. For instance, Cancer Treatment Centers of America ran afoul of the FTC in representing in its marketing materials, without sufficient evidence, that certain "treatments" (e.g., whole body hypothermia) were proven (and approved) to successfully treat cancer where conventional therapies has failed.
CTCA has also been accused of touting "success" rates in its marketing materials that, among other things, are alleged to be largely due to its practice of cherry-picking patients and selectively reporting even their outcomes. See, e.g., http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/06/us-usa-cancer-ctca-idUSBRE9250L820130306
More from an anonymous former CTCA employee about its marketing model: http://www.naturopathicdiaries.com/ctca-the-cancer-treatment-charade-of-america/
Posted by: Michelle Meyer | August 31, 2015 at 03:50 PM
Puffery anyone?
Posted by: Enrique Guerra Pujol | August 31, 2015 at 10:25 PM
To me, it is more of a positive thinking campaign.
Posted by: anon | September 01, 2015 at 07:29 AM