Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13482

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

Ferner RE, Beard K.
Over the counter medicines: proceed with caution
BMJ 2008 Mar 29; 336:(7646):694
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/336/7646/694

Abstract:

Robin Ferner and Keith Beard caution that the risks of increasing people’s access to over the counter medicines may outweigh the benefits

An all party parliamentary group in England is currently assessing whether there is a case for banning over the counter access to analgesics containing weak opioids.1 Recent coroner’s inquests found that a 41 year old man died from respiratory depression after taking an over the counter analgesic containing paracetamol and dihydrocodeine2 and attributed the death of a 49 year old woman to renal failure from addiction to an over the counter preparation containing ibuprofen and codeine.3 Here we consider what determines whether a medicine is available over the counter and whether changes are needed…

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