what exactly is the deal behind when they say “ 9 out of 10 doctors approve this medication”?
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It’s just marketing language, and you should disregard that kind of advice. Because if it actually *is* a product recommended by actual doctors, your doctor will probably prescribe it.
Usually when a statement like that is made, somewhere in fine print will be a source, basically a survey.
You would really need to know what constituted a positive answer. For example, if you went and asked a 100 Doctors “Do you think Tylenol is an effective pain reliever?” probably nearly all would say Yes, some would probably hedge and say it depends on what type of pain and what other health issues you have, etc. But safely 9 out of 10 “approve” of Tylenol.
That however does not mean (though it is implied) that it is better than Advil or other similar drugs. Basically any drug that is approved for use by the FDA probably can get a high percentage of Doctors to say that it is effective.
Because it’s believable. It evolved from doctors promoting cigarettes and other phony science. People stopped believing one random doctor, so they upped the denominator.
Look up the 4 out of 5 dentists prefer Trident sugarless gum commercials.
The school I work at promotes a 100 percent graduation rate. Nobody believes it, and it’s not true, so it gets no traction.
If they said we have a 90 percent graduation rate, everybody would be cool and we could actually hit the number. Nobody thinks they or their children are bottom 10 percent, so it carries legitimacy.
Biased sample fallacy.
The doctors asked most likely had some financial incentive, loyalty of misinformation on the product and/or company.
Also, they may have asked hundreds of sample sets of ten until they got the highest percentage.
Also, if a premium product, they may have asked doctors in wealthy area or practice, whereas they would have got a different result in less wealthy areas.
It’s a con trick.
to let an error margin! by not saying 100% of dentist approve it they allow like a couple of dentist to actually say that they don’t recommend it
You got one part of the question slightly wrong. Usually the word these ads use is even stronger than “approve”. You don’t want to use “approve” in ads like this because it suggests that one in ten doctors *does not approve*, and you don’t want your ad to suggest that. I think that most commonly used verb is “recommend”. Recommending something is much stronger and not recommending something is much weaker, and they still can get away with making the claim, so they do that.
The sentence is engineered to evoke the feeling that a survey asked a sample of doctors the question “which brand of this product do you prefer?” and that a huge majority picked the brand being advertised. This is false. There is an actual survey, but the survey is phrased in a confirmatory way, not a selective one. For example “in the list below, select all product brands that you would recommend over not using any product at all”. That is, the survey is designed so that essentially all doctors check all the boxes in the survey.
It goes like this:
Question: Which medications do you recommend for headache relief?
Doctor 1: Tylenol, Advil, Motrin
Doctor 2: Tylenol, Aleve
Doctor 3; Advil, Motrin
Doctor 4: Tylenol, Motrin
Doctor 5: Tylenol, Advil
Though 4 of the 5 doctors recommended medications other than Tylenol, they also recommended Tylenol. This means the creators of Tylenol could claim 4 out of 5 doctors recommend their product.
There are a lot of tricks involved, but mostly it’s a type of rigged question:
“Patient complains of frequent allergies, do you recommend:
(A) use this OTC drug that has met FDA approval
Or
(B) Do nothing and hope symptoms recede with time”
Apparently, and I’m digging up memories from the last time this was asked, they do it in an interesting way.
Basically, they give tons of free samples to dentists, then ask questions like “Would you recommend people use *our brand* or no toothpaste?” – if they can get even a few dentists to respond (maybe by having a paid survey), they can get 100% or near 100% saying, effectively, “Yes, using toothpaste is better than not using toothpaste”, but it can be twisted into “Recommends/approves this”. The 9/10 is to make it “believable”, since people don’t believe perfection.
Because there’s always going to be SOME doctor that is against any kind of treatment. They can’t say 10/10 doctors agree, because that would imply 100% of doctors support the treatment, which can never be true. Saying 9/10 sounds a lot better in a commercial than 99/100 or 999/1000. So it’s basically a way for them to say a lot of doctor’s approve it, without false advertising.
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