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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15960

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

TGA to investigate Sigma
Pharmacy Daily (Australia) - registration required 2009 Jul 13
http://www.pharmacydaily.com.au


Full text:

THE Thereapeutic Goods Administration has been ordered to conduct an investigation into the Sigma-organised boat cruise for pharmacists and doctors, the Parliamentary Secretary for Health Mark Butler confirmed today.

Speaking with Pharmacy Daily this afternoon, Butler said that he had ordered the investigation in
order to determine whether Sigma was in breach of restrictions on the promotion of products.

He said that while Sigma is not a member of Medicines Australia, and so is not bound by the MA code of conduct in its entirity, the company must comply with the code when it comes to product promotions.

“Public confidence in this indusrty and its relationship with pharmacists is critically important,” Butler said, adding that to maintain public confidence in pharmacists’ advice, it is necessary to ensure that no conflicts of interest or perceptions of conflicts of interest arise.

Sigma has stated that the cruise will not be used to promote products, and numerous other industry players have rejected claims of a conflict of interest, stating that such fears are unjustified
because passengers on the cruise will be paying for themselves.

The TGA has now asked Sigma to provide it with “all the information surrounding this promotion.”

Mr Butler could not comment on the potential ramifications for Sigma if it is found to be in breach.

 

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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