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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13175

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

Dhalla I, Laupacis A.
Moving from opacity to transparency in pharmaceutical policy
CMAJ 2008 Feb 12; 178:(4):428-31
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/178/4/428


Abstract:

Physicians and patients should demand, and participants in the system should provide, transparency in all of the areas of drug approval and reimbursement (Table 1). The current situation, in which the evidence used to make decisions often remains secret and the decisions are not adequately explained to the public, is untenable. We wrote this commentary in response to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health’s 2007 parliamentary review of the Common Drug Review program. Established in 2002 by the federal government, the Common Drug Review was charged with evaluating the cost-effectiveness of new outpatient drugs and to make recommendations to Canada’s publicly funded drug plans.1,2 Although many submissions to Parliament’s Standing Committee on Health legitimately criticized the Common Drug Review’s lack of transparency, we believe that the scope of both the criticism and the review itself was too narrow. We suggest that, from start to finish, the drug evaluation systems in Canada and elsewhere lack transparency…


Notes:

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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