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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14326

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

Campbell D.
NHS drug bill faces EU threat
The Observer (Guardian) 2008 Sep 21
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/sep/21/pharmaceuticals.nhs?gusrc=rss&feed=society


Full text:

The NHS’s £11bn annual bill for drugs could soar if pharmaceutical companies are allowed to start pushing promotional ‘information’ about their products directly to patients, claim health and consumer groups.

The European Union will next month unveil plans to let drug firms use the media to give information about prescription-only medicines. But opponents argue the controversial proposals would come close to contravening the longstanding ban on companies advertising branded drugs.

The British Medical Association, Which? and Royal College of Physicians are among nine leading organisations that have written a joint letter to the European Commission urging it to abandon its plan to allow direct-to-consumer information.

They fear that if this is allowed, patients will start demanding specific drugs they have seen promoted and reduce doctors’ ability to prescribe cheaper alternatives. That happened in America after it relaxed its rules in 1997 to permit such material.

‘If we increase the demand for branded medicines the NHS drugs bill could go sky-high, putting its finite resources under threat,’ said Pete Moorey, the public affairs manager at Which?.

The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry declined to comment.

 

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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