Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18003

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

Holmes WF.
Conflicts of interest between the prescriber, the regulator and the profit maker.
Clin Microbiol Infect 2001; 7:

Abstract:

The traditional, highly valued, clinical freedom of doctors is under threat with the development of evidence-based protocols. Contact with the pharmaceutical industry provides doctors with education and resource but at what cost? Government has failed to match the industry in this arena. Conflicts of interest arise when the balance between the information provided by these two bodies is uneven. Authorities’ desire for impartial prescribing is not matched by their willingness to support the training and working practices which would deliver it.

Keywords:
* Conflict of Interest* * Drug Industry/economics * Drug Industry/standards* * Drug Prescriptions/economics * Drug Prescriptions/standards* * Education, Continuing * Great Britain * Humans * Physician's Practice Patterns/standards * Primary Health Care/economics * Primary Health Care/standards*

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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