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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 6768

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

Chiu JT.
Personal use of drug samples by physicians and office staff.
JAMA 1997 Nov 19; 278:(19):1568


Abstract:

Shen Nung who purportedly founded Chinese herbal medicine by testing hundreds of potentially medicinal plants would have been the first known offender. It is naïve to believe that such practice will make a quark of difference in drug cost. By choosing a certain brand a physician is actually giving the drug a personal endorsement. Although I agree that a physician should not use samples for a chronic condition, the short-term use can actually enhance treatment skill by noting the efficacy and adverse effects first hand.

Keywords:
*letter to the editor/United States/ Advertising* Drug Industry* Drug Utilization* Ethics Humans Interprofessional Relations Medical Staff* Physicians* United States

 

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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