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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11877

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

McLean T.
Name and shame 'bribed' doctors
Herald Sun (Melbourne) 2007 Oct 31
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22679124-5005961,00.html


Full text:

AUSTRALIAN doctors should be publicly named and even charged if they accept fancy dinners and other “bribes” from drug companies, an international congress has been told.

Outspoken NSW academic and writer Ray Moynihan has used the Consumers International Congress in Sydney to call for new rules imposed on pharmaceutical companies to go further to put an end to “poisonous and potentially deadly” drug promotion.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has introduced tougher new rules forcing pharmaceutical companies to declare all gifts to medical practitioners, which can include overseas trips and expensive meals.

Mr Moynihan, from the University of Newcastle, told the gathering of global consumer and corporate representatives that the competition watchdog had made a “very good start” at limiting the influence of drug makers on those who prescribe their products.

“Events like wining and dining now have to be revealed but what we don’t know is the names of the doctors attending these events, and that’s one of the next steps,” he told delegates.

“There’s no reason that patients shouldn’t get access to all that information about their doctors.”

The following step must be to criminalise those “bribes”, said Mr Moynihan, author of Selling Sickness, a book heavily critical of the drug industry.

“I don’t know whether judges can take bribes, they’re presumably not allowed to,” he joked. “Why are doctors allowed to take bribes?”

His comments came as Consumers International released a hard-hitting report revealing lists of dinners, trips and gifts from mousepads to motorbikes bestowed on doctors overseas.

In one example, a Malaysian GP received more than 70 gifts from several companies in just one month.

Industry representative Dr Harvey Bale, head of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, said many of the activities listed in the report were in breach of the federation’s own code of ethics.

He told delegates he accepted that heavy over-promotion of drugs could be concerning and needed to be addressed.

“To be a member of my federation a company must have an ethical drug promotion scheme,” Dr Bale said.

“But how that’s carried out … is not by any means perfect…”

 

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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