Healthy Skepticism Library item: 6901

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: news

Cottle M.
Selling shyness: how doctors and drug companies created the “social phobia” epidemic
New Republic 1999 Aug 2

Abstract:

At the same time that SmithKline Beecham received approval to market its antidepressant drug Paxil as a treatment for social phobia, a coalition of nonprofit groups, with financial support from SmithKline, launched a public awareness campaign about the condition under the slogan “Allergic to People.â€ This campaign is just one of a host of Anxiety Disorder Association of America (ADAA) projects that are funded by the pharmaceutical industry. One observer notes that drug companies don’t just market drugs they also maket views of illnesses. An example is how Merck in the 1960s bought and distributed 50000 copies of a book on recognizing and treating depression.

Keywords:
*feature story/United States/Anxiety Disorder Association of America/social phobia/SmithKline Beecham/Merck/conflict of interest/corporate funding/depression/Merck/Paxil/patient groups/PROMOTION BY THIRD PARTIES: PATIENT ORGANIZATIONS/SPONSORSHIP: PATIENT AND CONSUMER ORGANIZATIONS

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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