Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15095

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

Matheson A.
Corporate Science and the Husbandry of Scientific and Medical Knowledge by the Pharmaceutical Industry
BioSocieties 2008; 3:355–382
http://www.admatheson.com/AM%20BioSocieties%20paper%20Dec%2008.pdf

Abstract:

This article analyses the role of the pharmaceutical and medical device industries (â€˜pharma’) in
the construction of scientific and medical knowledge. Pharma’s activities are part of the broader
dispositif of institutions, enterprises, regulations and constituencies within which medical-scientific
knowledge is generated, but pharma’s contributions exhibit a specific character reflecting commercial
pressures. As drug development proceeds, research and marketing activities coalesce
around â€˜product canons’ that integrate scientific truth-claims and commercial positioning, generating
knowledge with implicit commercial functionality. From this platform, pharma stamps consensus-
building â€˜narratives’ into medical-scientific discourse, in which â€˜problems’ arise and are
â€˜solved’ by drugs. Concurrently, pharma modulates the structure of discourse and the social networks
through which discourse proceeds. Implicit within these activities is a meta-science whose
goal is to understand and technologize the operation of science to an external end. This mode
of knowledge production can be viewed as a normative transformation of Kuhnian normal science,
characterized by the attachment (and at times subordination) of paradigmatic tenets to
extrinsic goals; exaggerated control of belief, research and consensus formation; and a capacity
for infringement of traditional norms of scientific truthfulness. An International Standard of Integrity
in Science would strengthen pharma’s contributions to medical and scientific knowledge.

Keywords:
Foucault, Kuhn, Marketing, Medicine, Pharmaceutical Industry, Science Studies

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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