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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13960

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

Chase M.
Pricey Drugs Put Squeeze on Doctors
The Wall Street Journal 2008 Jul 8
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121548254807634713.html?mod=googlenews_wsj


Abstract:

SAN FRANCISCO — Long a burden for patients, hyperexpensive cancer drugs are causing economic havoc for another constituency in U.S. health care: doctors.

American doctors rarely used to let costs factor into their treatment decisions. But rising prices — some cancer drugs now cost more than $100,000 a year — are dramatically changing that ethos in the field of oncology. Money issues are now disrupting relationships with patients, causing doctors to go into debt and threatening to interfere with treatment options.

Unlike most physicians, who write patients prescriptions that they can fill at a pharmacy, oncologists must buy many drugs …

 

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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