Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13651

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

Healy D.
One flew over the conflict of interest nest
World Psychiatry 2007 Feb; 6:(1):26–27
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=17342217

Abstract:

Giovanni Fava has given us an excellent analysis of the development of crisis about commercial conflicts of interest in psychiatry. But there are some grounds to think the entire subject is something of a red herring, or that Fava’s position is itself industry-friendly.

If we view the issues from the frame of the past 400 years, and consider where science has come from, then it is clear that a key triumph of the new branch of knowledge lay not just in any of the so often celebrated breakthroughs in physics, chemistry or biology, but rather in the fact that society had found a means to move knowledge forward that overcame the issue of conflicting interests. If they adhered to the scientific method, then the fact that scientists might be Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Muslim, Jew or atheist was irrelevant…

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