corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15011

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

Coutts G.
Relationships with the drug industry: Collaboration to improve care
BMJ. 2009 Feb 3; 338:
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/338/feb03_2/b232


Abstract:

The relationship between the drug industry, academia, healthcare professionals, and patients has reached an all time low and few doubt that it is in the interests of all parties to improve it. A recent report from the Royal College of Physicians attempts to define a path towards achieving a more productive relationship. Here we set out five contrasting views on what the ideal relationship between industry and prescribers and patients should be and what steps need to be taken to achieve it.


Full text:

Healthcare professionals and patients need to have the most up to date information on all the treatment options available to them, including medicines. There is therefore a legitimate place for a responsible relationship between the drug industry and the NHS, prescribers, and patients. This relationship should support the promotion of good medical care, improve health outcomes, and reduce health inequalities. It should include the provision of information to guide valid patient choice.

Prescribers

Doctors, nurses, and pharmacists all receive rigorous training, and patients demand a high degree of medical and pharmacological knowledge from them. Despite this, there are those who would deny healthcare professionals access to the drug industry, which researched and undertook the clinical trials to develop the medicines.

It is paradoxical that some do not consider doctors capable of separating good information from bad. Relations with industry have changed in recent years. The appropriately derided medical conference junket culture . . .

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to 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.

Email a Friend








Cases of wilful misrepresentation are a rarity in medical advertising. For every advertisement in which nonexistent doctors are called on to testify or deliberately irrelevant references are bunched up in [fine print], you will find a hundred or more whose greatest offenses are unquestioning enthusiasm and the skill to communicate it.

The best defence the physician can muster against this kind of advertising is a healthy skepticism and a willingness, not always apparent in the past, to do his homework. He must cultivate a flair for spotting the logical loophole, the invalid clinical trial, the unreliable or meaningless testimonial, the unneeded improvement and the unlikely claim. Above all, he must develop greater resistance to the lure of the fashionable and the new.
- Pierre R. Garai (advertising executive) 1963