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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1044

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

NZMA calls for ban on DTCA
2003 Apr 9


Full text:

The NZMA is calling on the Government to prohibit Direct to Consumer Advertising (DTCA) of prescription medicines in New Zealand.

‘The NZMA has been reviewing its position on DTCA of prescription medicines and has now decided that the disadvantages outweigh the benefits,’ says NZMA Chairman Dr Tricia Briscoe. ‘We believe it is time for the Government to move into line with most other countries in prohibiting DTCA.’

‘This is a change in our position, but our previous reluctant acceptance of DTCA was always based on the need for stronger self-regulation and the principle that pharmaceutical companies must not test the boundaries of self-regulation.’

‘Indeed, our policy read: “…our support for continuing but enhanced self-regulation is conditional on the industry that it is meticulous in its application of self-regulation…there is no room in the DTCA regimen for ‘testing the boundaries”. If the NZMA cannot be sure that industry self-regulation protects the health and safety of New Zealanders, we will reconsider our position.”

‘In our view,’ says Dr Briscoe, ’The pharmaceutical industry, the advertising industry and the Ministry of Health have had plenty of time to make the changes recommended by the 2001 Ministerial Review of DTCA, but have failed to take action. In some instances, pharmaceutical companies have continued to “test the boundaries”.’

‘We no longer have confidence that self-regulation is sufficient to protect the interests of either patients or doctors, nor do we feel that greater government regulation would provide adequate protection. We have therefore come to the conclusion that DTCA of prescription medicines should be prohibited.’

 

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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