Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11064

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

Dowden JS.
A century of concern about complementary medicines
Aust Prescr 2007 Aug; 30:(4):91
http://www.australianprescriber.com/magazine/30/4/artid/896/

Notes:

(Free full text at Aust Prescr site)

In August 1907 the Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia received the report of the Royal Commission on Secret Drugs, Cures and Foods.1 This revealed the widespread promotion and purchase of dangerous and useless medicines…

…Beale found that newspapers and magazines were publishing stories which were really promotional pieces, in addition to accepting advertising for unproven medicines. Even then the marketing was sophisticated with companies buying and selling the names of pharmacists’ customers. Beale therefore proposed a ban on pharmaceutical advertising…

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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