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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13198

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

US drug industry spent $22m (£11m; 14m) on lobbying in 2007
BMJ 2008 Mar 8; 336:(7643):524
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/336/7643/524


Abstract:

US drug industry spent $22m (£11m; 14m) on lobbying in 2007: Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, which represents pharmaceutical research and biotechnology companies, increased its spending on lobbying the federal government in 2007 by 25% from the previous year’s figure. Last year it lobbied Congress to expand children’s health insurance and against a proposal that would have allowed the government to negotiate drug prices for elderly people. It also lobbied against legislation that would have allowed imports of cheaper drugs from Canada, reforms that would have weakened patent protection on drugs, and an overhaul of the drug safety programme of the Food and Drug Administration.

 

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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