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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15547

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: news

Sweet M.
Who’s the loser with this clever drug company campaign?
Croakey: The Crikey Health Blog 2009 Apr 28
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/croakey/2009/04/28/whos-the-loser-with-this-clever-drug-company-campaign/


Full text:

You’ve got to hand it to Sanofi-Aventis.

At the same time as the Vioxx case before the Federal Court is producing an alarming string of stories about the hazards of overly close ties between doctors and pharma (as an example, see this story in the Oz and this one in The Age), Sanofi-Aventis has enticed a prominent medical research institute into a bed that is likely to prove most uncomfortable.

The 1 May issue of Australian Doctor has just landed on my desk, confirming this story in today’s Oz.

Page 13 carries a Sanofi-Aventis ad for its blood thinning medicine clopidogrel (brand name Plavix) that also boasts the logo of the Baker IDI Heart & Diabetes Institute.

Readers are told: “When you write a Plavix script, Baker IDI & Diabetes Institute benefits too. For every Plavix script dispensed through retail pharmacy in 2009, sanofi-aventis will donate 25c to support their medical research and preventative health programs.”

The deal has already raised $100,681 for the Baker, according to the advertisement.

It’s a clever campaign. While everyone loves to receive a gift, most people feel even better about giving one. Rather than wooing doctors with the usual range of prezzies – nice meals, trips to somewhere exotic, crappy pens etc – this campaign is turning them into gift-givers.

This may be clever but it’s also extremely dubious. Is it suggesting that considerations other than what is best for the patient before them might influence doctors’ prescribing choices? Perish the thought.

And here’s a few other questions:

• Will all of the Institute’s researchers be declaring this tie in their future conflict of interest statements?

• Will they declare this conflict when making any public pronouncements – in the media, in journals, at conferences, in committee meetings – about any conditions or areas of research where Sanofi-Aventis may have an interest, especially in relation to this drug?

• Will the public’s confidence in the Institute and its scientific integrity be dented?

One of the lessons to have emerged so far from the Vioxx case is the naivity – or perhaps in some cases wilful ignorance – with which many doctors have entered into relationships with pharmaceutical companies.

The companies use these relationships to their marketing advantage; while there may be some gains for the individual doctors involved in terms of access to research funding and so on, they also risk suffering damage to their reputations and perceived independence.

This may also be the lesson for the Baker; the deal may bring them in some extra dollars, but at what cost?

 

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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