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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13956

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: news

Let's intercept Big Pharma's Hail Mary pass
Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group 2008 Jul 11
http://masspirg.org/action/rx_drugs?id4=ES


Full text:

Yesterday, the pharmaceutical industry announced it will voluntarily ban a marketing tactic that’s gotten it into some hot water: plying physicians with promotional gifts. (You’ve probably noticed them at your doctor’s office — the pens, calendars and trinkets covered with the logos of blockbuster drugs.) [1]

Sounds good, right? Less gifts mean doctors won’t be easily swayed by drug makers’ giveaways.

But look behind the announcement and it’s not so hard to see what’s really going on. With the Massachusetts House about to vote on a much better, far more comprehensive ban, and similar proposals being floated in other states, the drug industry lobby is trying to cut off attempts for real reform at the knees. [2]

The House is expected to vote on the ban soon, possibly as early as next Tuesday.

Please ask your representative to vote for patient safety and lower health care costs by putting an end to the drug industry’s notoriously over-the-top marketing campaigns.

(US residents can email their representatives quickly and easily via the MASSPIRG site)

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/07/10/
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/10/business/10code.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin

 

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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