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…