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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17039

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

Gornall J
A very public break-up
BMJ 2010 Jan 18;
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/340/jan18_1/c110


Abstract:

With hindsight, it is easy to see the email sent by NMT Medical’s Geoff Fournie in August 2004 as a prophetic moment in the story of the highly public collapse of the relationship between the Boston medical devices company and British cardiologist Peter Wilmshurst.

Mr Fournie, vice president of clinical development for Europe, was writing to Len Doyal, the ethical adviser of NMT’s then embryonic trial, Migraine Intervention with STARFlex Technology (MIST), investigating whether closure of patent foramen ovales with the company’s septal repair implant might cure migraine. Not only was Dr Wilmshurst “the ‘seminal thinker’ in this area,” he wrote, he was also “recognized as an ‘ethical physician.’”

Conceived as a randomised, double blind, placebo controlled study in which control patients would have a general anaesthetic and sham procedure, the trial was ethically pioneering, and Mr Fournie was keen to stress Dr Wilmshurst’s credentials as a member of its . . .

 

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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