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: 17676

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

Harvey slams generic code
Pharmacy Daily 2010 Apr 22
www.pharmacydaily.com.au


Full text:

LA TROBE University’s School of Public Health has formally objected to the proposed Generic Medicines Industry
Association Code of Practice (PD 13 Apr), saying it is “considerably weaker (and less specific)” than the codes of
Medicines Australia and the Australian Self-Medication Industry.

The university’s Ken Harvey says the GMiA Code only requires the reporting of promotional activities to prescribers and
not dispensers, adding that he believes this is inappropriate given previous concern about ‘educational’ events directed
at pharmacists, such as the controversial Sigma cruises..

He’s also pointed out that fines imposed under the code are much smaller than those which apply to Medicines Australia
members, and also taken exception to the GMiA process which sees complaints go first to member companies rather than an
independent panel.

Harvey said the anomalies highlight issues previously raised with the variety of “complex and convoluted co-regulatory
systems for therapeutic claims and promotional practices”.

He’s also sent the submission to Parliamentary Secretary for Health Mark Butler, urging the adoption of a govt-funded
single overarching Code applicable to all therapeutic claims and promotional practices, supported by one monitoring
process, a single complaint and appeal process and one set of effective sanctions.

 

  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