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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12362

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

Collier J.
Parliamentary review asks NICE to do better still.
BMJ 2008 Jan 12; 336:(7635):56-7
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/336/7635/56?etoc


Abstract:

On Wednesday 9 January 2008, the House of Commons health select committee published the report of its second inquiry into the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).1 The committee’s first inquiry into NICE was published six years ago,2 just three years after the institute’s launch. Much has happened since the initial inquiry. The institute is now well established and is a core policy driver within the National Health Service in England and Wales (its remit does not cover Scotland), and we know much more about how it operates. Moreover, the working environment of the institute has changed with, for instance, the publication of the Cooksey report on funding for health research in the United Kingdom,3 the introduction of legislation making NICE technology appraisals essentially compulsory,4 the involvement of the courts in a legal challenge to NICE,5 and most recently the Office of Fair Trading’s critical review of how

 

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Cases of wilful misrepresentation are a rarity in medical advertising. For every advertisement in which nonexistent doctors are called on to testify or deliberately irrelevant references are bunched up in [fine print], you will find a hundred or more whose greatest offenses are unquestioning enthusiasm and the skill to communicate it.

The best defence the physician can muster against this kind of advertising is a healthy skepticism and a willingness, not always apparent in the past, to do his homework. He must cultivate a flair for spotting the logical loophole, the invalid clinical trial, the unreliable or meaningless testimonial, the unneeded improvement and the unlikely claim. Above all, he must develop greater resistance to the lure of the fashionable and the new.
- Pierre R. Garai (advertising executive) 1963