In the early nineties of the last century, while researchers (1) from Pfizer were trying to study the effect of a new chemical with the UK-92,480 number in test tubes in order to come up with a new treatment for angina, some of them discovered while searching behind the side effects It causes indigestion in some cases, some pain in the back and legs of some patients, but there was a note, which did not seem important at first, saying that continuing with a dose of 50 milligrams every eight hours for ten days also caused a noticeable erection for patients, as a side effect. .
That substance was in fact nothing but sildenafil, which did not make significant progress in its intended purpose, at first, which directed researchers to pay attention to these new side effects, here everyone threw the previous plan that tried to find a good job for sildenafil In cases of angina pectoris, and a completely new line of research began asking if it was possible to use this substance in the treatment of cases of ED, then after about six years, that is, exactly twenty years ago from today, March 1998, the new drug obtains administration permission Food and Drug Administration "FDA", to become "Viagra", the ideal solution for problems of erectile dysfunction.
Disease promotion before medication
Takaishi.. Relationship Manager at Pfizer Medical Company, which manufactures Viagra (Reuters)
Now let's jump to the year 2014, that was the first time that Pfizer decided to use the English lady Lent Beaumont (3) in the promotion of Viagra ads. Initially the target customer of the campaigns was men, in their forties, with direct promotion of the fact that an estimated 50% of men suffer from Erectile Dysfunction after the age of 40, but this new shift is targeting women On issues related to men's problems, it was not a revolutionary leap as it seemed, but had very deep roots, the roots of the promotion of the product itself.
With the first moments of discovering Viagra, the obvious problem faced by the company's marketing team was how to build a market for a product of this particular nature, and the basic idea was that promoting Viagra would be within the scope of it being a "treatment for a medical condition", this of course is the only thing capable of promoting it among doctors as a start. , This condition is "erectile dysfunction", but that name was not common at this time, but rather it was a state of impotence, and here the battle begins.
This may seem a little strange, because if you search for either of the two terms today on the web, look at Wikipedia for example, you will find that they refer to the same thing, but that was not the case when the company started its campaigns, and to understand what we mean here let's compare impotence and erectile dysfunction, The first is the inability to achieve or maintain an erection, and the second is the inability to achieve or maintain an erection—let's focus a bit on the next word—and this term was actually first used in the late 1980s by a survey (4) of the Massachusetts Center for the Study of Male Aging Male Aging Study, in which you ask respondents about their sexual abilities in a different way.
Where the evaluation included that the person indicates any of the following options: (completely unable, somewhat capable, moderately capable, or fully capable) It was this state of gradualness that created this new term (impotence), which has become a more conventional term. Foggy means you have an underlying condition if you only test “average able” which means that there is already an erection but the person is unable to maintain it, is unable to perform well “all” of the time, or is not satisfied with Sometimes, while the only pathological condition was (totally unable).
What is normal?!
What Pfizer has done is a very clever double game, as it promoted Viagra as meeting a need for a large number of people (Reuters)
Here came the results of the sample, which included about 1,300 people, ages 40-70, to say that 52% fall under the three choices that include sexual inability or weakness, and these results are what is used so far in the center of Viagra promotion campaigns, where you will often find those The sentence that says (5) (about 50% of men after forty suffer from erectile dysfunction to some degree), and before the appearance of Viagra, that condition that says (moderately able) was not medical in the first place, it was a natural thing to decrease the ability of some men to achieve an erection Little by little after the age of forty.
What Pfizer did, then, is a very smart double game. The promotion of Viagra ensures that it treats a medical condition in the first place, and this is what gave it a degree of strength in the face of the idea that it is more like a nutritional supplement used to improve a normal condition, but that medical condition expands its scope to include half The men of the world are within a specific age group, and the company’s smart plan was to promote the disease before promoting Viagra itself, so once you enter the blue pill site on the Internet, you will find a permanent and clear indication of (6) that there are “degrees” of erectile dysfunction and that Viagra treats all of them. .
Viagra was one of the most important examples of how promoting drugs as "Life Style Drugs" opens up new, broader markets, and in his book Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets The American Dream philosopher Carl Elliott (7) says that the pharmaceutical industry has learned to deal with life needs with great caution during the promotion of medicines. Patients with a loss of focus, and each of the drugs that treat both of them are mainly used - and promoted - in a purely medical manner, yet that picture expands to include a side of cases that would have been placed within the normal range, cases such as shyness or poor concentration.
The concept of "medicalization" (8) refers to the process by which a condition or problem is designated as a medical condition, and thus becomes an object of medical study, diagnosis, prevention or treatment, and the basic problem stems from our attempt to define the concept "disease" in the first place, When we give a medical character to a condition that was not medical, we are somehow redefining what the disease means to include a new range that was normal before.
How far can we extend the difference from the correct model so that we say that we are still in the normal range?
In the case of Viagra, we can ask: How can it be said that 50% of men on the planet, within a certain age group, become ill after the age of forty?
What is normal when half of the people are sick?
Viagra virility
Very nice, now the doctrine of promoting Viagra has been determined, and the role of a different marketing mechanism, Bob Dole (9), an American lawyer and politician who represented the state of Kansas in the Senate from the 1960s until the 1990s, a war hero and a former presidential candidate, was the first to appear in Viagra ads , an exemplary model (in his sixties) for the condition that sildenafil is used to treat. ED, but it is so important to millions of men and their partners that I decided to talk about it publicly.”
But the next stage of Viagra’s marketing included TV ads for younger people. For example, Rafael Palmeiro, the famous 39-year-old baseball player, also became one of the icons of Viagra. To consider several separate main itineraries used to promote Viagra itself, one talking about romantic Viagra, another talking about Mr. Bob Dole's category, and another talking about virility Viagra.
In this last point, we can contemplate the mechanism that was used to promote Viagra in a country such as Sweden (10), where, in the summer of 2003, Pfizer hired a specialized company on a national level to conduct a poll looking for what masculinity means to the Swedes in ten points, and the results appeared to say that masculinity means (Be practical, fertile, have a well-paid job, have an attractive partner, a muscular body, an attractive exterior, are interested in sports, always ready for sex, have technical tools (mobile phone, watch, etc.), and then have a wonderful, sexy car for attention).
Here the company used that list as a direct way to promote Viagra, as this list, in the aggregate, gives the general picture of the new Viagra customer, who is not a sick man suffering from erectile dysfunction as much as a normal person trying to make an effort to become the perfect man, the man who He gets ten points out of ten, which all relate to what masculinity means in that respect.
At that point, and until now, Viagra completely turned into a lifestyle rather than a drug.
sexual revolution
The story of Viagra, then, is not only about the invention of that little blue pill, but it is also a story that tells of how to create needs that did not exist before, needs that made every person in the world see himself as a potential consumer of Viagra just because he wanted to add improvements to his masculinity, and the first mechanisms were to promote, And the subsequent ramifications, which gave the smart promotional rulebook for the next generations of the active substances used to treat erectile dysfunction, and the alternatives that opened the door to them during the past years to take more prominent methodologies for the importance of virility as one and only important characteristic in a man’s married life. What Viagra started is What ends now is the unofficial advertisements for sexual stimulants on many television channels in the Arab world, those that made their heroes young men in their twenties and thirties.
Therefore, in addition to reshaping the mechanisms (11) that are used to market substances that cause wide degrees of embarrassment, Viagra has contributed to reshaping modern human society as a whole, as it helped break the barrier of secrecy and fear, so sexual problems became a topic of common conversation, and of course there are many advantages, but With contemplating this shift in the position and importance of sexual topics in the media and the side conversations of men and women, we find that this has a very important side effect related to what masculinity basically means, and the extent of the importance of the sexual factor, alone, as a base for building relationships between men and women, and thus building all societies.
In the end, as a pharmacist, when you ask me about Viagra, or other sexual stimulants that contain the same substance, and what more, my scientific answer will not exceed what Lynet Beamont says of accurate scientific information in the advertisement, the drug is actually safe except for its caveats in well-known advertisements, And it helped millions of people to overcome a problem that we could not imagine having solutions to, and in some countries, Viagra has officially turned (12) into a drug that does not require a prescription. Perhaps that was the announcement of the final success of Pfizer’s first plan to transform a diseased case from A private picture to a more general picture that includes - curious - half of the world's men of a wide age group.
We don't really know if it's good or bad, but we do know that it raises a lot of questions.