News November

Breathless CBS Report Refers to Diet Drug Acomplia as 'Magic Pill,' and 'Miracle Pill'

The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric on Nov. 29th managed to promote a story on diet drug Acomplia by asking if rimonabant is "the magic pill many in the United States have been waiting for," and then answering its own question with an interview of one obese woman who says: "This is my miracle pill."

CBS News correspondent Richard Roth, who reported from London where Acomplia has been on sale for five months, had indicated in a posting on the Acomplia Report Forum he was hoping to interview users of the diet drug to find out: "Has the drug helped you? Hurt you? Or made no difference at all?"

We guess he didn't find any of the patients who have posted on the Acomplia Report Forum and other U.K. forums their experiences with the drug.

For in Roth's report, he interviews only one woman -- a patient of Dr. David Haslem, who by the way participated in the Sanofi-Aventis launch news conference for Acomplia -- and his story makes no reference to side-effects, adverse experiences with the drug, or results from taking the drug of any kind.

Instead, the woman, Marie Smith, says: "I'm not going to be fat and 60. I want to be slim and 60." She has nothing to say about whether she is making progress toward that goal.

Roth, however, says: "It's no wonder drug, according to Smith's doctor, but it may be a wonderful one."

And her doctor burbles: "The most exciting thing is not only that it induces weight loss, but over and above the effect induced by weight loss, you get more effect on the cholesterol, on the sugar, on the other risk factors that make obesity such a risky condition in the first place."

The report concludes that Marie Smith is not worried about possible long-term effects of Acomplia, or that she may have to take it for the rest of her life, because she "just wants her old self back."

"Anything to help me lose the weight, because inside this little short lady is a slim one desperate to get out," Smith says. And in her mind, Roth says, this pill is going to work.

This is probably not the kind of coverage of five months of U.K. patient experience with Acomplia that one might have looked for in the Edward R. Murrow era, or the Walter Cronkite era, or even the Dan Rather era. But that seems to be what qualifies as a hard-hitting report in new era of Katie Couric.