Assignment:

Medicine advertisement vs. quackery advertisement

Objectives

During the assignment, you will learn: 

  • To identify the differences between medicines and nutritional supplements. 
  • To assess the reliability of the information presented in medicine and nutritional supplement advertisements. 

Assignment options  

Select one of the assignments below: 

1.  Find a medicine or nutritional supplement advertisement in a magazine or on the Internet and present it to the others. Discuss together with the help of following questions: What kind of advertisements were found? What information do they contain? What is the information in the advertisements based on? What kind of promises are given in the advertisements? Is the information reliable? 

2.  Design a medicine and / or quackery advertisement and implement it in a manner you want. You can utilise the Canva software, for example. 

3.  Design a medicine or quackery advertisement to be broadcast on TV in the group and present it in the classroom.

4.  Write a reflective essay about the Wonderpill with the help the examples:

Wonderpill – intelligence, muscle mass, and thick hair

Pete was excited. The paper had an advertisement for a wonderpill that promised intelligence, muscle mass, and thick hair. Pete decided to go out and buy a Wonderpill. What happened next? Continue the story. 

Awesome ad about the Wonderpill

The advertisement makes the following claims: “When you take the Wonderpill for two weeks, you will get thick hair and your muscle mass will grow. Over 80 per cent of Wonderpill users notice the difference after just one week of use. Use the Wonderpill regularly to get awesome results”. What do you think about the reliability of the claims in the advertisement? For example, consider what the claims in the advertisement are based on. Would you buy the Wonderpill based on the information? 

For the teacher 

It is a good idea to reserve 1–2 lessons for this assignment. Assignment options include assignments that can be implemented alone and in a group. The assignment supports the health education objectives O8 and O12 and content areas C2 and C3 of the Finnish national core curriculum.

Familiarise yourself with the differences between medicines and dietary supplements together, after which you will complete an assignment according to instructions from the teacher or an assignment selected by the pupils from the assignment alternatives presented above. Tips for tuning:

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