Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15240

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

Thomas L.
Medical professionals for sale?
The Lancet 2009 Mar 7; 373:(9666):810
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2809%2960482-7/fulltext

Abstract:

Much has been written in the medical press about the influence of the pharmaceutical industry within the medical profession. Many of the conclusions drawn, it seems to me, are well meaning but rather nebulous theoretical constructs. The question has been seen solely from the medical profession’s sadly limited perspective and the views of concerned members of the general public are either unknown or ignored. Please allow me to tell you how this influence can permeate the profession…

normathomas@talktalk.net

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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