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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11774

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

Vitry A, Lexchin J, Mansfield PR.
Is Australia's National Medicines Policy Failing? The Case of Cox-2 Inhibitors
Int J Health Serv 2007 Oct; 37:(4):735 - 744
http://baywood.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,9,13;journal,1,148;linkingpublicationresults,1:300313,1


Abstract:

Australia has a National Medicines Policy with aims that include quality use of medicines, but policy stakeholders failed to protect Australia from the COX-2 (cyclo-oxygenase-2) inhibitor disaster. Drug regulators did not warn prescribers appropriately about potential cardiovascular risks. The Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme did not limit unjustified drug expenditures on COX-2 inhibitors. Drug companies ran intense and misleading promotional campaigns on COX-2 inhibitors without adequate controls. Independent drug information was insufficient to counter the effects of the millions of dollars spent on advertising. Core elements of the National Medicines Policy-in particular the drug approval process, the post-marketing sur-veillance system, the control of drug promotion, and the quality of independent drug information-require major reappraisal if we want to avoid similar disasters in the future.

 

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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