Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17210

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

Aldis WL
Industry influence: Big Pharma’s long tentacles
BMJ 2010 Feb 16;
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/340/feb16_1/c941

Abstract:

The BMJ gives two more examples of penetration by the pharmaceutical industry into what, in a better world, would be protected places: Harvard Medical School1 and the World Health Organization.2

In this atmosphere of hidden payments and conflict of interest, medical professionals still go with some confidence to journals such as the BMJ, and the general public to trusted media such as the New York Times. It is distressing therefore to come across an article in the New York Times calling into question the safety and effectiveness of generic medicines.3 It has already met with warm approval on the internet, especially on pharmaceutical industry sponsored websites.

But before suspicion of generic drugs becomes received wisdom under the imprimatur of the New York Times, the subject deserves a closer look.

By introducing the subject as a problem of generic v brand products, the author plays into the hands . . .

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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