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: 15214

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

Ball DR, Kamel Y, Perkins V.
Reframing relations with Pharma: Entanglement in Scotland
BMJ 2009 Feb 24; 338:(7693):b763
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/338/feb24_1/b763


Abstract:

We surveyed all anaesthetic departments in Scotland to assess links between anaesthetists and companies through sponsored “free lunches.“1 After institutional approval, one of us (YK) telephoned all 34 anaesthetic departments in April 2008. A standardised questionnaire was used and the respondents remained anonymous.

There were two refusals, giving a response rate of 94%. Twenty six of the 32 respondents had sponsored meetings. In all, 21 received food, while one was unsure; 22 accepted gifts. Two had more than one meeting a week, four had one meeting a week, six more than one meeting a month, six a monthly meeting, and three less than one meeting a month. Two described their contact as variable, one was unsure, and one had meetings by invitation only.

Only two of the 32 departments replied that they followed a guideline for these contacts-one its hospital policy and the other its own internal guidance.

In the . . .

dball@nhs.net

 

  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








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