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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11739

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

Bardelay G.
Pharmaceutical industry: the bugbear of healthcare professionals’ training and patient information
ISDB Newsletter 2007 Oct
http://www.isdbweb.org/documents/uploads/newsletter_open/ISDBNewsletter_October2007_000.pdf


Abstract:

“The successful transplant is one which the organism accepts as part of itself and incorporates into its living whole. By this definition, today’s pharmaceutical industry is like a successful
transplant within the body of the medical profession.

The pharma industry can do everything, and everything is expected of it. It is a constant presence, watchful and attentive, good-natured and thoughtful, pre-empting every slightest wish: plying junior hospital doctors with food and drink, improving food in the hospital staff room, providing
or upgrading the department’s computer or photocopier, sponsoring the boss and the deputy’s trips to the USA, staging mock oral exams to help trainees prepare for their competitive exams, laying on drinks for graduation ceremonies or for the hospital bridge tournament, the continuing education session lunch, providing therapeutic information, computer network logistics and training healthcare sector managers, etc., etc.

Clinical research, bibliographies, publications, conference proceedings, continuing education, equipment, leisure facilities, gadgets… we are deeply indebted to the pharma industry.

The carefully maintained symbiosis between pharmaceutical firms and healthcare professionals causes the latter to abandon their critical faculties and forget their true social function. It distracts them from their real market and human value: patient service rather than the volume of drugs prescribed.(…)” (1).

The above quote is from an editorial in la revue Prescrire, published in 1998. Over the last 30 years, numerous voices from around the world have expressed alarm at the serious dangers of allowing
pharmaceutical firms to be involved in the training of healthcare professionals…

 

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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