Open Collections

Riek, Emma Katherine

University of British Columbia

We are surrounded by advertisements for pain drugs, and yet people who are in pain are often met with doubt when reporting their pain to others, including doctors, employers, and even friends. Despite a climate of doubt, advertisements for both prescription and non-prescription pain drugs tend to display seemingly unconditional belief in pain as a strategy to sell drugs to treat that pain. This thesis engages in a rhetorical analysis of advertisements for pain drugs, broadly defined, and their engagements with doubt in order to determine not just what these ads are saying about doubt, but also how they craft their claims. The primary sources I examine are contemporary advertisements for prescription and non-prescription drugs found in popular magazines and medical journals, both in print and online; the introductory chapter elaborates on my methodology and provides further contextualization to this thesis. The second chapter draws on Judy Segal and Elaine Scarry’s prior work on the rhetoric of pharmaceutical advertisements and focuses on how, and to what persuasive effect, advertisements engage with doubt and convey belief in pain. The third chapter analyzes advertisements for non-prescription pain drugs found in popular magazines and focuses on the rhetorical strategies these ads use to gain consumers’ trust in both the company and their products. This chapter also adopts a historical perspective and includes a comparison of the rhetorical strategies featured in patent-medicine versus contemporary advertisements. The final chapter includes a reflection on this project and looks ahead to future research opportunities. I find that, despite displays of unconditional belief, drug advertising reinforces existing stereotypical beliefs about pain: who feels it, how they feel it, and whose pain deserves to be believed. My goal is to offer a set of tools with which to better understand drug advertising by identifying rhetorical strategies that are often common among a wide range of ads.

Text

2022-12-23

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/83508

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/