Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17037

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

Wilmshurst PT
Is there no place for integrity in academic medicine?
BMJ 2010 Jan 19;
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/340/jan19_2/c281

Abstract:

Any right thinking person who has followed the events in the case reported by Dyer must be impressed by the integrity and courage shown by Aubrey Blumsohn in trying to ensure that clinical research was analysed and presented properly.1 The conduct of Sheffield University, Professor Eastell, the trial sponsor (Procter and Gamble), and the General Medical Council all fell short of what patients and the public should expect. It is Blumsohn who lost his job.

The messages are clear: there is no place for integrity in academic medicine, and whistleblowers will not be protected.

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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