An ESPN story got some attention on Twitter last night, dredging up the old urology marketing ploy of promoting vasectomies for men who are lying around watching March Madness and the NCAA basketball tournament for days at a time anyway. Actually, ESPN just trotted out a story they published 2 years ago and called it “Snip and Roll.” The network included a phone interview with a man who “took one for the team,” as the network put it. The story claimed that, “In the last several years, urologists across the country have reported increases of as much as 50 percent in the number of vasectomies scheduled in the days leading to the NCAA tournament.”
The re-posting of the two-year old story on the eve of March Madness beginning again led to some Twitter activity Wednesday night.
Pitt urologist Benjamin Davies simply tweeted, “911 Carrera is all.” As in the Porsche 911 Carrera. As in…more vasectomies…more urologists improving their ride.
I joined the vas deferens discussion by pointing out how long this has been going on – that I’ve written about it twice in the past 6 years:
A Salt Lake City TV station shows a billboard basketball-vasectomy promotion.
Another Salt Lake station showed another aspect of the marketing campaign, including basketball-sized ice packs for the rehab period.
Basketball March Madness….Baseball spring training….golfing’s The Masters. Urology seems to be vasectomy-vying for March marketing honors.
Maybe dermatologists will use toenail fungus to try to win April or May marketing honors in anticipation of beach-and-pool season.
Note: A blog for The American Journal of Kidney Diseases has created “NephMadness” – “an homage to the NCAA Basketball Tournament, March Madness, but while the basketball tournament seeds the top ranked basketball teams, we use some of the most important, newest, and controversial concepts in nephrology. … We expect that some of the concepts will be novel, even to academically minded nephrologists, so we provide deep, fully referenced, guides to each of the concepts.” If you’re more into nephrology than urology, you may want to fill out your brackets.
Addendum on March 20:
As we approach the second round of the tournament, a second round of Vas Madness ads from Dr. Edward Schloss on Twitter (@EJSMD):
Comments
Please note, comments are no longer published through this website. All previously made comments are still archived and available for viewing through select posts.
Comments are closed.
Our Comments Policy
But before leaving a comment, please review these notes about our policy.
You are responsible for any comments you leave on this site.
This site is primarily a forum for discussion about the quality (or lack thereof) in journalism or other media messages (advertising, marketing, public relations, medical journals, etc.) It is not intended to be a forum for definitive discussions about medicine or science.
We will delete comments that include personal attacks, unfounded allegations, unverified claims, product pitches, profanity or any from anyone who does not list a full name and a functioning email address. We will also end any thread of repetitive comments. We don”t give medical advice so we won”t respond to questions asking for it.
We don”t have sufficient staffing to contact each commenter who left such a message. If you have a question about why your comment was edited or removed, you can email us at feedback@healthnewsreview.org.
There has been a recent burst of attention to troubles with many comments left on science and science news/communication websites. Read “Online science comments: trolls, trash and treasure.”
The authors of the Retraction Watch comments policy urge commenters:
We”re also concerned about anonymous comments. We ask that all commenters leave their full name and provide an actual email address in case we feel we need to contact them. We may delete any comment left by someone who does not leave their name and a legitimate email address.
And, as noted, product pitches of any sort – pushing treatments, tests, products, procedures, physicians, medical centers, books, websites – are likely to be deleted. We don”t accept advertising on this site and are not going to give it away free.
The ability to leave comments expires after a certain period of time. So you may find that you’re unable to leave a comment on an article that is more than a few months old.
You might also like