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: 1673

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

HAI DTCA statement
2002 Feb 10
http://www.haiweb.org/campaign/DTCA/index.html


Full text:

Health Action International Europe released a statement this week emphasising that recently published research provides new evidence of the harmful effects of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs. It again called on the EU Commission to reject any legislation that weakens the current ban on DTCA.

HAI Europe and others have criticised the EU Commission’s proposed changes to Article 88 of the current EU regulation on advertising which would allow pharmaceutical companies to provide ‘information’ to people living with AIDS, diabetes or asthma during a five-year trial period.

In addition to the release, HAI Europe and the European Public Health Alliance have issued a joint statement on the proposed relaxation of the EU ban on direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription medicines. The statement is based on conclusions reached at the two organisations’ meeting “Providing Prescription Medicine Information to Consumers: Is there a role for direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA)?” held in January.

The statement points out that people want objective information about prescription medicine and that many are concerned that advertising, by its very nature, cannot fulfil this need. It also emphasises that no one seems to be taking responsibility for the Commissionís proposal. Although DG Enterprise has repeatedly suggested that patient groups are the driving force behind the proposed changes, in fact, at the HAI/EPHA symposium, its representative was unable to name any group that has expressed support for the changes in the regulation. The statement goes on to highlight the fact that there is no evidence that the Commission’s proposal on Article 88 will benefit public health, while there is growing evidence that it endangers health.

HAI and EPHA (plus many other organisations that have endorsed the statement) have called on the EU Parliament, Council and Commission to reject the proposal in its current form and to vigorously enforce the present legislation. They have also called on the EU to develop a robust consumer information and education strategy and to encourage the provision of independent and comparative information about medicines for health professionals and the public.

 

  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