Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14165

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

Podolsky SH, Greene JA.
A Historical Perspective of Pharmaceutical Promotion and Physician Education
JAMA 2008 Aug 20; 300:(7):831
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/extract/300/7/831

Abstract:

The medical profession has recently awakened to a crisis over industrial influence in medical education. In recent years, the problem of industrial funding of continuing medical education (CME) has been the subject of stern warnings from academic medicine, prominent congressional hearings, and strict revisions of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education’s Standards for Commercial Support. Commercial support for CME continues to increase and now comprises more than half of all CME income. These clear indicators of dependence have raised widespread concerns of bias in the ongoing education of practicing physicians regarding new drugs and failure of the medical profession to assume responsibility for educating physicians.1

How did this come to be? Critics of the role of pharmaceutical promotion in medical education have claimed that policy changes in the 1980s altered relations between the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry. However, . . .

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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