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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17099

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

Ferring and Stiefel named and shamed for Code breaches
InPharm 2010 Jan 12
http://www.inpharm.com/news/ferring-and-stiefel-named-and-shamed-code-breaches


Full text:

Ferring Pharmaceuticals and Stiefel Laboratories have been named and shamed for breaching the ABPI Code of Practice.

Adverts giving details about the cases appeared in the BMJ, The Pharmaceutical Journal and The Nursing Standard in December.

Stiefel’s misdemeanour was to present the output of a company-run meeting as an independent supplement to a medical journal.

A GP and a pharmacist complained about the insert on the management of mild and moderate acne vulgaris using Duac Once Daily Gel (dindamicyn 1% and benzoyl peroxide 5%).

Consistent with recent cases regarding sponsored insets, this activity was deemed to contravene clause 2 of UK pharma’s Code of Practice, which deals with bringing discredit upon, and reducing confidence in, the industry.

Ferring, meanwhile, has breached several more clauses, according to the ABPI’s arms-length Code overseer the Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA).

The company voluntarily admitted that Ferring’s public relations agency sent unapproved copy about prescription-only medicine Firmagon (degarelix) to a patient organisation.

The agency edited Ferring’s approved information about the drug, which is indicated for the treatment of advanced prostate cancer, and the patient group used this to develop content on its own website.

The agency had left out a number of key elements from the original, including side effects, background data on prostate cancer and comments from a clinical urologist.

It also added the sentence “Ask your doctor for more information about FIRMAGON” and exaggerated the time taken by LHRH agonists to achieve castrate levels of testosterone.

As well as being found guilty of a clause 2 infringement, the PMCPA cited Ferring on four more counts.

These were: failing to maintain high standards (clause 9.1), failing to certify information provided to a patient organisation (clause 14.3) and encouraging members of the public to ask their health professional to prescribe a specific prescription-only medicine (clause 22.2).

The PMCPA said Ferring had also influenced the text of patient organisation material in a manner favourable to a company’s commercial interests (clause 23.6).

Changes were made to the website text after about a month.

 

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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