Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11128

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

Kassirer JP.
Professional societies and industry support: what is the quid pro quo?
Perspect Biol Med 2007 Win; 50:(1):7-17
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/perspectives_in_biology_and_medicine/v050/50.1kassirer.html

Abstract:

Professional medical societies have become increasingly dependent on pharmaceutical, device, and biotechnology companies for ongoing support of their programs, but the internal influence of this financial largesse on medical societies’ practices is well hidden. Many examples exist in which societies’ educational products, including clinical practice guidelines and professional publications, have been tainted by involvement by industry-paid individuals. These examples show that professional judgments of organizations can be affected in ways that are not in the best interests of our patients. Society leaders should develop policies that leave critical decisions, especially those that affect patient care, in the hands of members without financial ties to industry. Society leaders should not accept funds designated for specific industry-recommended projects unless such programs are already part of their planned agenda. These leaders, who typically serve for only a year or two, should delve into arrangements that salaried society executives make with industry, and insure that no promises are made that compromise an organization’s professional goals. Professional societies should also find ways of reducing the vast, embarrassing industry involvement at their national meetings, especially the vulgar circus-like displays and the drug company-sponsored symposia. We must reduce commercialism and restore professionalism to our medical meetings.

Keywords:
MeSH Terms: Drug Industry Drug Therapy/trends Financial Support* Industry/economics* Societies* Societies, Medical

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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