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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11437

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

Read J.
Schizophrenia, drug companies and the internet.
Soc Sci Med 2007 Sep 7; Epub ahead of print
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=GatewayURL&_origin=inwardhub&_urlversion=4&_method=citationSearch&_piikey=S0277953607004315&_referrer=www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fsites%2Fentrez&_version=1&md5=c8e5d0fc31a5f2d513592095763c656a


Abstract:

To investigate differences in the content of websites funded, and not funded, by drug companies, the top 50 websites about ‘schizophrenia’ in Google and Yahoo were analysed in relation to five variables: three scales relating to causes, treatments and violence, and two categorical variables about the condition being extremely severe and about linking coming off medication to violence. Fifty eight percent of the websites analysed received funding from drug companies. Drug company funded websites were significantly more likely to espouse bio-genetic rather than psycho-social causal explanations, to emphasise medication rather than psycho-social treatments, to portray ‘schizophrenia’ as a debilitating, devastating and long-term illness, and to link violence to coming off medication. They were neither more nor less likely to describe ‘schizophrenics’ as violent. These results suggest that the documented influence of the pharmaceutical industry over research, professional organisations, teaching institutions, clinical practice and regulatory bodies may now extend to public promotion, via the internet, of perspectives conducive to maximisation of sales.

 

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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