Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14994

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

Collier J.
Doctors, patients, and the pharmaceutical industry
BMJ 2009 Feb 3; 338:b443
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/338/feb03_2/b443

Abstract:

New report reflects a working party that has lost its way

On 4 February 2009, the Royal College of Physicians of London (RCP) published a report entitled Innovating for Health: Patients, Physicians, the Pharmaceutical Industry and the NHS.1 The report is the outcome of deliberations by a working party convened by the college in September 2007, chaired by Richard Horton (editor of the Lancet), and it comprises 70 pages and 42 recommendations. Despite its heritage the work is flawed, thereby diminishing the validity of the recommendations and the obligation to take them seriously.

The ideal working party has clear and understandable terms of reference; has a membership selected to tackle the problems at hand; concentrates primarily on resolving questions posed by its terms; produces a report that sets out the problems in such a way that each recommendation follows logically from the text; and finally, offers recommendations that are realistic and correctly targeted. In this instance, these ideals are . . .

Joe Collier, emeritus professor of medicines policy
1 St George’s, London SW17 0RE
jcollier@sgul.ac.uk

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts

If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Announcements

PharmedOut’s annual conference: Missing The Target: When Practitioners Harm More Than Heal

No Free Lunch is merging with Healthy Skepticism

Conference program: Pharma Knows Best? Managing Medical Knowledge

Prescrire’s proposals for France’s national conference on medicines policy

Pharmed Out Conference ‘Pharma Knows Best? Managing Medical Knowledge’

More announcements

What's new on this site

Library Home

Library Search

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