Healthy Skepticism Library item: 527

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Rennie D.
Thyroid storm.
JAMA 1997 Apr 16; 277:(15):1238-43

Keywords:
*editorial United States drug company sponsored research conflict of interest academic freedom relationship between researchers, academic institutions and industry Betty Dong Synthroid Boots Knoll American Thyroid Association PROMOTION DISGUISED: CLINICAL TRIALS PROMOTION DISGUISED: DISINFORMATION AND HARASSMENT SPONSORSHIP: RESEARCH

Notes:

This editorial recounts the story of how Boots Pharmaceuticals, makers of Synthroid (thyroid replacement) contracted with Betty Dong, a researcher at the University of California-San Francisco, to undertake a study to show that generic forms of Synthroid were not bioequivalent to it. When Dong’s study showed otherwise Boots stopped publication of the article and threatened to sue her for contract violation. The editorial discusses all of the ramifications of this event.

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909