I'm Not a Doctor, but...

May 9, 2009— -- I'm not sure how many bottles of cough syrup were sold with the line, "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV," and I don't know how much touting his non-M.D.-status helped the career of Peter Bergman, who played Dr. Cliff Warner on "All My Children," but the line was recycled enough by late-night comedians to join "I've fallen and I can't get up" and padded shoulders as essential 1980s camp.

I, however, have always been more intrigued by real doctors who sell products.

My fascination with the subject started when my husband "inherited" a cache of old medical journals that had been squirreled away in the storage area of the medical publishing company where he worked.

When the company relocated from New York to Cleveland, the movers found the boxes and -- for some unknown reason -- deposited them in my husband's new office on the North Coast of America (that's how we think of ourselves on the south shore of Lake Erie).

There were two really fascinating aspects to the this treasure trove -- first, the journals were really small, pocket-sized actually, and second, they contained cigarette ads!

Yes. Right there on the back cover was a picture of a doctor endorsing Camels as the choice of most physicians. And Camels weren't the only cigarettes endorsed by the men in white (I found no cigarette ads with women physicians, although some had nurses -- defined by crisp white caps -- lighting the physician's cigarette).

Right then, I was hooked -- not by Camels, but by the idea of physicians taking side jobs as pitchmen.

My fascination has been nurtured by my fascination with both infomercials and those two-page spread print ads for weight loss products that you find in the back of airline magazines -- put a white-coated image into the mix and you've got my attention.

My first thought is always the same: "Is that really a doctor?" Turns out, the answer is often, "Yes."

Several years ago, the NBC newsmagazine "Dateline" investigated infomercials and found out that doctor endorsements were considered a standard part of the package delivered by infomercial producers.