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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11349

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: book

Pearce N.
Adverse Reactions: The Fenoterol Story
Auckland: Auckland University Press 2007
http://web.archive.org/web/20081231211217/http://www.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/aup/book/2007/fenoterol.cfm


Abstract:

Beginning in 1976 deaths from asthma in New Zealand rose suddenly and dramatically, tripling by 1979. Neil Pearce tells the controversial and gripping story of how a group of young researchers, of whom the author was one, discovered that the asthma drug fenoterol was the cause of this alarming epidemic. Facing powerful pressures and hostile opposition from conservative medical opinion and from the drug industry, they persisted, and finally saw their conclusions accepted and the death rate falling. Neil Pearce recalls the years 1988-1990, the period of this struggle, as a personal story but he also draws attention to many issues about drug safety in New Zealand and internationally and about the contest between money and science in medical research.

 

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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