Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13397

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

Hébert PC.
The need for an Institute of Continuing Health Education
CMAJ 2008 Mar 25; 178:(7):805-6, 809-810
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/178/7/805

Abstract:

At a recent conference on continuing education involving many major US stakeholders and the CMAJ, participants agreed that our current system of continuing professional development is in dire need of a major overhaul. Currently, continuing medical education activities are, for the most part, sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry, which has a vested interest in promoting its products. This is big business: of the $2.6 billion spent in the United States on accredited continuing medical education activities in 2006, $1.45 billion (60%) came from pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers.1 Although there are no reliable data in Canada, there is also no evidence that the situation is any different here…

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