Source: http://med.stanford.edu Author: Tracie White Tobacco companies conducted a carefully crafted, decades-long campaign to manipulate throat doctors into helping to calm concerns among an increasingly worried public that smoking might be bad for their health, according to a new study by researchers at the School of Medicine. Beginning in the 1920s, this campaign continued for over half of a century. “Tobacco companies sought to exploit the faith the public had in the medical profession as a means of reassuring their customers that smoking was safe,” said Robert Jackler, MD, the Edward C. and Amy H. Sewall Professor in Otolaryngology. “Tobacco companies dreamed up slogans such as, ‘Not one single case of throat irritation with Camels;’ then, to justify their advertising claims, marketing departments sought out pliant doctors to conduct well-compensated, pseudoscientific ‘research,’ which invariably found the sponsoring company’s cigarettes to be safe,” Jackler said. “The companies successfully influenced these physicians not only to promote the notion that smoking was healthful, but actually to recommend it as a treatment for throat irritation.” Jackler is the senior author of the study, which was published in the January issue of The Laryngoscope. Hussein Samji, MD, a recent Stanford residency graduate, was his co-author. Using internal documents from tobacco companies from the Legacy Tobacco Document archives, the study’s authors reviewed a wealth of correspondence, contracts, marketing plans and payment receipts that shed light on the industry’s multifaceted, highly effective campaign. Jackler’s ongoing research into the history of tobacco company advertising has resulted in several [...]