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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15719

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

Rubenstein S.
Drug-Maker Pens Are Endangered Species at Cancer Confab
The Wall Street Journal Blog 2009 Jun 2
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/06/02/drug-company-pens-are-endangered-species-at-cancer-confab/


Full text:

Many doctors attending ASCO, the big annual cancer conference, are leaving empty-handed this year.

Sure, there have been plenty of scientific presentations, lots of data to mull. But where are the pens?!

Tchotchkes are normally a mainstay of these confabs. But now that the drug industry pledged to stop giving away logo-laden pens, mugs, flash drives and the like to doctors, they’ve been much harder to come by at this year’s conference held in Orlando, Fla.

Here’s how Thomas Gryta of Dow Jones Newswires describes the somber scene: “According to booth workers, traffic is drastically lower, and they blame the lack of giveaways. In years past, rows of doctors with bags would run from booth to booth, lined up like kids on Halloween.”

That said, it’s not a lost cause for drug companies trying to get some marketing mileage out of the conference. The doctors who are still coming to the booths tend to stay longer, drug reps told Dow Jones, and tend to have a genuine interest in learning about the drug or related science. Plus, there are still company-sponsored dinners, meetings and off-site educational sessions “that happen to occur in swank establishments,” Gryta adds.

To get a feel for the tone at other conferences like this, read a dispatch from Peter Loftus of Dow Jones from a big cardiology conference a couple years ago. He described not only the scads of giveaways, but an amusement-park-like contraption from AstraZeneca in which docs could take a simulated journey through an artery.

 

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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