Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18043

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

Spurgeon D
GlaxoSmithKline staff told not to publicise ineffectiveness of its drug
BMJ 2004 Feb 21; 328:(7437):422
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/328/7437/422

Abstract:

Gates announces $83m for research into TB vaccine: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced an $82.9m (£43.9m; â‚¬64.9m) grant to the Aeras Global TB Vaccine Foundation, based in Bethesda, Maryland, to support development of new vaccines to prevent tuberculosis, which kills nearly two million people a year.

Maggots on prescription: A decision by the Prescription Pricing Authority means that GPs will be able to prescribe sterile maggots of the common greenbottle Lucilia sericata for the treatment of all types of infected and necrotic wounds for patients in the community. The maggots, marketed under the tradename LarvE, are produced by the Biosurgical Research Unit in Bridgend, south Wales, which is part of the Bro Morgannwg NHS Trust.

Both life expectancy and infant mortality rise in the United States: Overall life expectancy in the United States reached a new high of 77.4 years in 2002, up from 77.2 in 2001, . . .

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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