Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13828

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

Buckwell C.
Should the drug industry work with key opinion leaders? Yes
BMJ 2008 Jun 21; 336:(7658):1404
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/336/7658/1404

Abstract:

Industry commonly works with experts to put across its message. Charlie Buckwell believes that such interaction is essential for medical advancement, but Giovanni Fava (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39541.731493.59) argues that it risks scientific integrity

This question is a microcosm of the broader debate about how the drug industry and clinicians should interact. It leads to two tempting but indefensible end points-either that doctors are immune to marketing and should be free to do as they wish with industry or that industry is inherently corrupting, making all contact with it unethical.1

Both positions are flawed, and the reality is much more complex…

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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