In the US the book has a 3.4 rating. 61% are 5 stars and 39% being 1 star.
One review is positive.
That's interesting. Because it doesn't focus on the truth issue - but really emphasises that this is about the PR industry surrounding medicine.
If you think about it, from
her and
the SMC's job point of view, it is a fantastic advertisement. They are in PR and the truth seems to be that those with good, real scientific developments - or products that 'sell themselves' - or more precisely 'good reputations' are generally less in need of huge PR budgets. They also create fewer scandals to cover up or detract from.
SO if you think of this as a shop window for the talents in PR then one chapter would need to be focused on just what they can do with truth-reversal and 'handling a situation' when poor science is being exposed. And they've managed well to keep it distracted from - it's the exact same dead cat strategy they wheeled out first in 2011, and have used goodness knows how many times since then each time more real data comes out about the trial to 'change the narrative' to 'fake rumours about patients' instead of anyone looking at the data itself.
This chapter title is indeed a weird culmination, and might seem to be over-bold in putting it into a different medium where they are not hiding behind 'not being publishers themselves' (just pushing it to them) and 'only online'.
But I guess she boxed herself in. I guess when she got to that chapter she thought she'd been busy and would have a lot to say. But... the reality of spending over a decade PRing the same story that had been repeated umpteen times - even though the judge in the court case found they could only produce evidence of 'one heckle (which might actually have just been a question from an academic?) at a lecture' for that - would have instead undermined all the work that they had done. She'd be outing them as much as herself.
Plus if she wrote it was the same story as 2011 rehashed, surely that moment in court would become rather relevant for all the times it was re-PRed in the many years afterwards. Or maybe she never asked them - and still has never asked - and all this is what the woman has come to through believing what they've been suggesting over those years, and is from them effectively ? I'd love to know if she believed any of it or not (you'd think she'd have checked by the time it got to a book a least)
What do you do to explain 11years of doing that? You end up at a whole new level of storytelling via one mechanism or another... The bit I don't get is that this is a book, and had publishers and different obligations regarding regulation etc. So it has certainly managed to get me interested in thinking about that..
