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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14973

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

Redding D.
Drug companies and the public: EC proposal can be defeated.
BMJ. 2009 Jan 27;
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/338/jan27_2/b291?papetoc


Abstract:

Although it remains worrying, the European Commission’s proposal for greater freedom for pharmaceutical companies to communicate directly to patients about prescription drugs has already been significantly watered down, and can still be defeated.1

An early version of the proposal suggested that companies could use television, radio, and printed media as channels for dissemination. This would clearly have allowed them to cross the imaginary boundary between information and advertising.

Under pressure from campaign groups, including Picker Institute Europe, television and radio were dropped, while printed media became more tightly defined as health related publications.

Delays caused by opposition from within and outside the commission may have prevented the directive passing through the current European parliament, which ends in June.

At whatever stage it reappears, the proposal can be defeated if patient and professional groups make their views known to members of the European parliament and to member governments, both of whom . . .

Keywords:
Communication Drug Industry/legislation & jurisprudence* Drug Information Services/legislation & jurisprudence* European Union Patient Education as Topic/legislation & jurisprudence Prescription 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