Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14034

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

Committee on Genetics, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists; Committee on Ethics, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
ACOG Committee Opinion No. 409: Direct-to-consumer marketing of genetic testing
Obstet Gynecol. 2008 Jun; 111:(6):1493-4
http://www.greenjournal.org/cgi/reprint/111/6/1493

Abstract:

Marketing of genetic testing, although similar to direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs, raises additional concerns and considerations. These include issues of limited knowledge among patients and health care providers of available genetic tests, difficulty in interpretation of genetic testing results, lack of federal oversight of companies offering genetic testing, and issues of privacy and confidentiality. Until all of these considerations are addressed, direct or home genetic testing should be discouraged because of the potential harm of a misinterpreted or inaccurate result.

Keywords:
Advertising as Topic/legislation & jurisprudence* Genetic Screening/legislation & jurisprudence* Humans United States

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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